Giorgio de Chirico is one of the painters we know so well from all the reproductions we used to display on our walls when we were breathless students: those lonely, wind-swept piazzas, headless statues and tiny humanoids with their weirdly over-stretched shadows... In fact, as with so many other painters, his work often looks better in reproduction. The crudity of application is smoothed away. All we are left with is the strangely disturbing idea of the work itself, and – in the very best of his art – the bald, bold use of contrasting primary colours. Look at the poster created for this exhibition for example, or the laminated cover of the press pack. They are more arresting than the painting called The Enigma of the Arrival and the Afternoon that it used as its starting point.

A rare signed first edition of the first full-length work by author George Orwell has sold for £86,000, auctioneers said today.

The sixth in Qiu Xialong's Inspector Chen series, The Mao Case is the usual enjoyable mix of murder, poetry and contradictions of contemporary Chinese culture. Chen is asked by the Party to secretly investigate the whereabouts of a mysterious object that the granddaughter of one of Mao's old lovers is thought to possess. The carefully schizoid attitude to Mao is evident: all Chinese deplore the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution, but it's not allowed to blame Mao. Chen himself, no lover of Mao, rebukes a taxi-driver for speaking ill of him.

I 'm going to do something irritating, which is to recommend an experience that you can't have. Or probably can't, anyway, the Manchester Festival production of It Felt Like a Kiss having sold out not very long after booking opened – on the strength, I take it, of a collaboration which pulls together three potent fanbases: admirers of Damon Albarn, who provides some of the music; devotees of Punchdrunk's site-specific theatre events and fans of Adam Curtis's uniquely suggestive political documentaries.