Jody and Simon Blake have spent the past couple of months showing off their twins, Reuben and Floren, to friends – and delighting in the looks of bemusement that greet them. Because while Reuben went back to school yesterday, his sister, Floren, will have to wait until 2017. The children were born five years apart, but technically they are twins because they were born from the same batch of embryos.

The Monday Interview: The capital's greatest chronicler tells Andy McSmith why upsurges of violence are part of the city's texture

There are elements of Nina Simone and Joan Armatrading in folk-jazz singer Krystle Warren's voice, and even Dusty at her dustiest, on the five tracks which here serve as a taster for two albums' worth of material intended for release over the next year.

Tate, London

Phil Boucher wonders if the greatest trick Lucifer ever pulled was to inspire such dangerous creativity

It has given its name to a hue of white that epitomises saintly purity. Now one of the great mysteries of the lily flower has been solved by scientists who have worked out precisely how it manages to bloom so spectacularly from its tightly enclosed bud.

The week in culture

The final resting place of some of the greatest names in English literature has been given Grade I status. Daniel Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe, and John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress, are among those buried at Bunhill Fields Cemetery in central London.

Tate Britain's new exhibition seeks to shake off watercolour's fusty exterior and reveal the dynamic, contemporary medium beneath. But will it wash?

History

This splendid second volume in the Armonico Consort's Naked Byrd series continues the punning tradition of a cappella versions of choral pieces by composers who, in the words of the Consort's artistic director Christopher Monks, "wore their hearts on their sleeves".

Further to your obituary of Tom Lubbock (10 January), Tom's championship of the painter he regarded as Britain's most important Modernist, Wyndham Lewis, will not be forgotten, writes Paul Edwards, Trustee, the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. Encountering the paintings first in reproduction in a public library in his youth, he was overwhelmed: "I had no idea images could be so glutting: the unimaginably gorgeous colours, the unfathomable imagery, the sharp and eliding textures, that electric line drawing." (Independent, 13 February 2005). Tom understood Lewis's work from the inside, sensing its relation to caricature, fascinated also by its almost Jacobean preoccupation with the metaphysical aspects of mortality: Red Figures Carrying Babies and Visiting Graves and One of the Stations of the Dead were two of his favourite paintings; the latter he listed in The Independent as one of the 10 greatest paintings in the UK, devoting a "Great Works" essay to it, as well. Only Tom could have noticed both its allusion to Thomas Browne's melancholy meditation Urn Burial and its more prosaic evocation of the London Underground.

It's a gloomy world that Rachel Kneebone has created at White Cube. The walls are painted in shades of grey, dark and brooding in the downstairs gallery and paler upstairs, the paint streaked in rain or tears. Kneebone makes extremely complex, delicate porcelain sculptures that teem with confusing, writhing tiny body parts arranged like urns or wreaths: a leg here, a penis or vagina there, and twisting forms that look as though they could be vines or spinal chords. Pieces of bodies in a horrific jumble. The sculptures are at times hideous visions that present bodies in states of fear, sadness and horror.

Some excellent short essays in this volume help to explain the nature of translation and its problems and challenges, almost as well as do the translated poems, laid side by side with their originals. My favourite was Sasha Dugdale's account of translating William Blake into Russian with a group of students in a town just outside Moscow. How to get across the sense of a self-taught poet at odds with tradition? Dugdale struggles with their lack of reverence for the originals, and one woman's rewriting of "The Sick Rose" almost breaks Dugdale's heart.