A sneak preview of a new exhibition about him sends shivers down my spine

Tomorrow, it will be 100 years since the writer Franz Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna from tuberculosis – and the good news is that as major literary anniversaries go, this one is easy to mark. You could, for instance, simply read him: a short story, perhaps, or a few pages of Ross Benjamin’s new, uncensored translation of his diaries. If you’re in Oxford, where his papers are in the Bodleian Library, you can see a new exhibition about him, and gawp at his sputum jar and a syringe of the type with which those treating him used to inject cocaine directly into his larynx; you might also wander in the city’s University Parks, where a giant inflatable “Jitterbug” – like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, it is half man and half insect – has appeared, as if from outer space.

Or you could just go about your regular life, and wait for the K-word – Kafkaesque – to float, unbidden, into your mind. The newspapers or the BBC will probably deliver at breakfast time, but if for some reason they don’t, there must be a bill you need to query, some kind of rebate you’re owed. Personally, I find that battling with the council over its stupid exercises in confirmation bias – questionnaires about low-traffic zones that permit only one “correct” answer – is good for reaffirming my sense that faceless, slightly sinister bureaucracy is indeed all around. But there are also a growing number of friends I can text, the better to find out how their David-and-Goliath office struggles are going. Oh, the glorious word soup that spouts endlessly from the mouths of HR departments!

On the eve of a vital South African election, activists tell how, 30 years ago, London became the centre of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and a base for exiled African National Congress leaders

Speak to those who were fighting it from afar, and they’ll tell you that for a long time, the political situation in apartheid-era South Africa appeared intractable. Even as they wouldn’t allow themselves to feel despondent – the campaign to boycott South African goods had, after all, been successful, and few musicians would tour the country – many activists wondered, deep down, if change would ever come. But in the mid-1980s, things seemed at last to shift. Suddenly, the atmosphere was heady. “There was an energy and excitement that I can’t even begin to describe,” says Chitra Karve, who in 1986 had just taken up a full-time job at the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London. “I worked an inordinate number of hours, but I never thought about that. I never even got tired. You were driven by the pace at which possibility was coming towards you: the possibility of real change.”

Karve had been a student activist, but now she found herself, not long out of university, at the heart of the fight to end apartheid. The team was small – just eight people – which meant that when she developed an interest in working with the press, she was allowed simply to get on with it. Two years later, when the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute took place at Wembley – an event now widely regarded as one of the most important consciousness-raising exercises ever staged – she was so busy dealing with journalists that she missed most of the concert. Up on stage were George Michael, Miriam Makeba, Tracy Chapman, Stevie Wonder and the Bee Gees. But for her, “glamour didn’t come into it”. She spent only 20 minutes in the area where the artists were hanging out: “I went into Harry Belafonte’s trailer where he was sitting with Trevor Huddleston [an Anglican bishop, Huddleston was the president of the AAM] and, wow, that was exciting. But the rest of the time, I was rushing about, trying to get the press organised.”

Prevailing through downpours with Pimm’s and panamas, the visitors haven’t changed even if the RHS event has

Squelch, squelch, squelch. To the RHS Chelsea flower show with my friend Sophie, where not even the “giant sponge” of a garden designed by Tom Massey and Je Ahn for WaterAid could soak up the downpour. On the night of our visit, someone had helpfully tipped a pile of wood shavings into the river that was flowing through the outdoor displays, to form a path for those who hadn’t had the foresight to match their floral frocks with waders. But, to no avail. Pretty soon it, too, was under water. The only thing to do was to act out a certain kind of crazed Britishness, a performance involving drinking a large vat of Pimm’s while pretending not to notice your nose is dripping and your lungs are blooming with incipient pneumonia.

In the 20 years since I last visited, Chelsea has changed a lot. It feels more corporate than of old, and rather sanitised as a result: for all its prettiness, I found it hard to connect with the Bridgerton Garden, sponsored by Netflix and inspired by Penelope Featherington, a “wallflower-like character”, from the latest television series.

The former New York Times journalist exposes the excesses of hyper-‘woke’ culture and the suffocating impact of groupthink in this enjoyable study of a topsy-turvy world

Morning After the Revolution by the American journalist Nellie Bowles is a wickedly enjoyable book about the madness that seemingly began to inflame the brains of a certain cohort of the liberal intelligentsia about four years ago (its author dates the fever to the pandemic, but I think – personal information! – it began some time before then). It was a delirium that took her, as it did many people, a little by surprise, not least because she in theory belonged to this subsection herself: at school, where she was for a while the only out gay person, she ran around sticking rainbows all over the place; after college she was known to go to readings at Verso Books (“my God, I bought a tote”); when her girl Hillary was “about to win” she was “drinking with I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar”. But once she’d noticed it, she couldn’t ignore it. Her instinct was to whip out a thermometer and ask a few pertinent diagnostic questions.

Asking questions, though, is (or it certainly was… things may be shifting now) verboten in the time of madness. Either you’re for the ideological buffet – every single dish – or you’re against it, and must eat at the bad restaurant where all the mean people hang out, a place that is otherwise known as “the wrong side of history”. When the insanity started, Bowles was working in Los Angeles for the New York Times, a job she’d dreamed of since childhood, and there her curiosity soon began to piss off some of her colleagues. When she went on to fall in love with a full-blown dissenter, the columnist Bari Weiss, who’s now her wife, she found herself on the outside of something, looking in. Morning After the Revolution is an account of her adventures in this topsy-turvy realm, in both the period before and after she left the NYT in 2021 (she and Weiss now run the Free Press). It comprises a series of reported colour pieces in which she touches on such things as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes, the campaign to defund the police, trans rights and (briefly) the crystal display she noticed when Meghan and Harry did pandemic Zooms from their home in Montecito.

On the eve of her UK retrospective Revelations, the veteran US feminist artist known for her large collaborative art installation pieces such as The Dinner Party – and for dividing the critics – is in celebratory mood

On-screen interviews can be a bit low-key, the victim of time lags and muffled human connections. But not the one on which I’ve just embarked, an experience I can only describe as psychedelic from the off. First to appear on my laptop is Donald Woodman, who sits and chats to me while we wait for Judy Chicago, the celebrated artist and his wife of 38 years, to arrive (a position in which I suspect he quite often finds himself).

Woodman, who is a photographer, has bleached blond hair, bright blue glasses, and gold polish on his nails, which he now waves at me. Apparently, he and Chicago have been going to the same manicurist for years, a routine so entrenched, it’s virtually part of their artistic practice. “It’s fun,” he says. “When I got married to her, I was wearing nail polish. You can’t let only the women adorn themselves. But it’s also a break from work, because it means I have to sit down for two hours.” The couple are famous workaholics, and their days – they live and work in an old railroad house in Belen, a small town in New Mexico – begin early and end late. “Last night, Judy came in and went straight to bed without any dinner,” he tells me, and I can’t quite tell from his tone whether he is proud or completely exhausted. (Maybe both: he is, after all, 78, and Chicago is 84.)

After being promoted by US bloggers and Instagram, cottage cheese sales are now up 40% in the UK. Its blandness is befitting of the times

While I didn’t see the cottage-cheese craze coming – who could ever have predicted this pineapple-chunk-inflected bout of collective madness? – now it’s here, I find myself strangely fascinated by it. In one sense, of course, its ascendancy is utterly banal: another creation of social media (its new popularity may be traced originally to TikTok), it can’t be long before the buffet moves on, maybe in the direction of luncheon meat or tinned mandarins. But on the other hand, it’s still deeply weird, especially to those of us who last ate cottage cheese three decades ago, and then only in extremis (as a student, I sometimes kept an emergency pot cooling on the window ledge of my college room for those piercing moments of youthful crisis when I had no time to eat properly).

Like a mushroom, this trend sprouted last year, seemingly overnight, in the US. “It’s time to stop pretending it’s not delicious,” said Emily Eggers, a New York chef and food blogger who was on a “mission” to make it the new burrata – a quote I thought so preposterous at the time, I quickly added it, last minute, to a book I was writing. But who’s laughing now? “In the 1970s, sales were focused on slimmers trying to lose weight before their holiday to Spain,” says Jimmy Dickinson, the owner of the brand we all remember, Longley Farm. “[But] now the interest is very much, ‘I’ve just swum 50 lengths, and I’ll eat cottage cheese as my protein fix at the end of it.’” According to Dickinson, demand in the UK has reportedly risen by as much as 40% in recent months, a growth that has been powered by the influencers of Instagram and their helpful recipes for dishes that try very hard indeed to make cottage cheese seem … oh dear. I had a look, and none of their ideas are even remotely alluring to my eyes. What, really, is the point of cottage-cheese cheesecake or cookie dough? Even if I was in search of a “protein hit” – at this point, I picture someone being beaten about the head with a leg of lamb – cottage-cheese lasagne is really not for me.