Holburne Museum, Bath
The feted photographer’s latest exhibition starts with images of ancient scultures depicting devotion and violence, before moving to war pictures and brooding Somerset landscapes

Few people have seen as much horror as Don McCullin. The feted photographer, now 90, witnessed major conflicts and disasters up close for decades. You can only imagine, through his widely published black and white pictures, how that might have affected him.

McCullin’s latest exhibition, Broken Beauty at the Holburne Museum in Bath, begins with four recent pictures of ruined Roman sculptures. These images – the white ruins photographed against black backgrounds so they float – are reminiscent at first of museum postcards, representations of representations that refer to ancient history and myths of fatal ambition, desire and domination. There’s a crouching Venus, her arms missing and head half-shattered. A hermaphrodite struggles to get away from a lascivious satyr. A headless Amazon and the Roman emperor Commodus, known for his uninhibited cruelty, are fighting on horseback. Their pockmarked surfaces and broken limbs suggest the collapse of the great empires, the fragility of ideals that are obliterated by time, like marble.

Forget brash statement projects – Riba’s prestigious gold medal has gone to a pivotal figure who works above an Aldi and designs billowing bandstands, jewel-like chapels and buildings that change colour

When Níall McLaughlin was shortlisted for the Stirling prize in 2013, for designing an exquisitely jewel-like chapel for a theological college near Oxford, he brought along his client to the prize-giving ceremony. It was the first (and possibly last) time a group of Anglican nuns had ever graced such a spectacle.

Despite clearly having God on his side, he lost out that year, but eventually scooped the Stirling in 2022, for the New Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Founded in 1428, Magdalene’s alumni include Samuel Pepys, Norman Hartnell and Bamber Gascoigne. Oxbridge colleges expect their buildings to endure, and McLaughlin delivered a reassuringly robust and handsomely detailed exemplar, mixing crisp planes of brick that recalled the American modernist Louis Kahn, with top notes of English Arts and Crafts, echoing the gabled forms of the college’s historic courts.

Australian children’s cartoon series about a family of blue heelers has yet to announce a new season

Australian-made animated series Bluey was the most streamed show in the US for the second year in a row, topping Nielsen’s annual year-end streaming charts for 2025.

US viewers watched 45.2bn minutes of the show on Disney+ according to Nielsen, down from 55.62bn in 2024, but still impressive given the show comprises 154 episodes – most of them less than 10 minutes’ long.