'Captivating' exhibition is 'as much an education as an art show' 

If there is one "tiny shred of good" that has come out of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is that we have finally started to take notice of this "fascinating and crucial" country, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Where once we might have considered it "a foggy blob in our lopsided imagining of Europe", occupied by various neighbouring powers for much of its history, its people and culture have now taken centre stage in our collective imagination. 

In the past, the story of modern art has seldom contained a "single paragraph" about Ukraine. Now, this "involving" exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, featuring more than 60 works created by Ukrainian artists in the first decades of the 20th century, sets that right. It tells "a complex artistic tale that keeps bumping tragically into the harsh world of politics". Most of the works here come from Ukraine's National Museum of Art, and were "smuggled out" of the country to keep them safe and promote a cultural history distinct from that of its larger neighbour. "As much an education as an art show, this is an important event."

Even were it not for the war, this would be "a captivating exhibition", said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. It shows how, in the early 20th century, Ukrainian artists melded styles such as cubism and futurism with Slavic folk traditions, invigorating them with a strong regional flavour. Alas, they were "insensitively lumped together in the West as 'the Russian avant-garde'", a categorisation that must have stung Ukrainians – for, in the 1930s, the Soviets purged the country's artistic elite, including many figures represented here.

There's some fantastic work on show: a moving 1910-11 painting by Volodymyr Burliuk, for instance, depicts a "blue-eyed Ukrainian peasant woman" in front of an abstract pattern (pictured above); Oleksandr Bohomazov's "Sharpening the Saws" (1927), meanwhile, offers "a rapturous, prismatic vision" of labourers in the local timber industry "tending to their tools".

It seems "a stretch" to define this epoch of Ukrainian art as distinctive from that of neighbouring countries, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. At the time, national identities in this part of the world were as "fluid" as the region's ever-shifting borders. Kazimir Malevich, for instance – represented here by a landscape of "a village seen through colossal forbidding tree trunks" – was born in Kyiv to Polish parents and lived largely in Russia.

Another major artist, Kyiv-trained Alexandra Exter, was born in Poland and spent most of her life in Paris. Still, there's no doubting her brilliance: her 1912 view of a bridge at Sèvres sees "shapes float or soar", colours shift, and "buildings abstracted into airy, blue-grey shards". It's a highlight of "a rich, always enlightening show" full of vivid, dynamic works, which is at times also "desperately affecting". 

by David Baddiel  

This "wincingly funny" memoir by the comedian David Baddiel is an account of growing up in a north London suburb with two "distant, distracted and erratic" parents, said Nick Duerden in The i Paper. 

Baddiel's father, Colin, was a misanthropic research scientist who, upon losing his job at Unilever, set up a market stall selling Dinky Toys. His mother, Sarah, was a "flamboyant damsel hoping that others might see her distress". The pair didn't seem to like each other much (though young David would regularly overhear their noisy sex) and Sarah compensated by having an "enduring dalliance" with a "pipe-smoking golf enthusiast" named David White. 

This affair, which lasted some 30 years, was "obsessive and barely concealed", said Tim Adams in The Observer. White was a "big cheese in the golfing memorabilia world" and, after meeting him, Sarah became so fascinated by him that she set up her own memorabilia company. She also left letters from White scattered around the house. Outwardly, Colin remained oblivious of his wife's "semi-secret life" – though Baddiel speculates that his repressed knowledge of it contributed to his "explosive irritability". 

Baddiel has told much of this story before, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian: his 2016 stage show "My Family: Not the Sitcom" "revolved around his mother's infidelity". But in this memoir, he "draws out the comedy" as he reflects on his parents with greater nuance and detail. While he dances "around the edge of decency" (in an email to White, which he shares, Sarah announces "MY CLITORIS IS ON FIRE!!!!!"), it is the job of "effective memoirists" to mix "the good, the terrible, the humiliating and the ridiculous". Baddiel has ultimately "done his parents proud" by giving us the "full, unvarnished picture".

Albanian writer who used metaphor to shine light on tyranny 

One of the greatest writers of the late 20th century, Ismail Kadare was often tipped for the Nobel Prize in Literature. That honour eluded him, said The New York Times, but in 2005, he was the inaugural winner of the Man Booker International Prize for his life's work. The other finalists included Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood and Gabriel García Márquez. Most of his books were set in his native Albania, or a disguised version of it, where for the first 30 years of his career he lived and worked under the regime of that "brutal and idiosyncratic dictator Enver Hoxha". To avoid persecution in a country in which thousands of dissidents were executed or sent to labour camps, he trod a delicate line. He served in the puppet parliament, and to curry favour with the regime, he once wrote a book in praise of Hoxha. But many of his novels "subversively attacked the dictatorship, skirting censorship through allegory, satire, myth and legend", and won him comparisons with Franz Kafka and George Orwell. 

The son of a civil servant, he grew up in the city of Gjirokastër, close to the Greek border, on a narrow street called Lunatics' Lane. He was eight when the Communists seized power in 1944, by which time he was already immersing himself in books. "At the age of 11 I had read 'Macbeth', which had hit me like lightning," he recalled. After studying at the University of Tirana, he was sent to the Gorky Institute in Moscow. However, his studies there were cut short when Hoxha fell out with Nikita Khrushchev, considering him insufficiently hardline, and broke off relations with the USSR. 

In 1970, "The General of the Dead Army" was translated into French, to enormous acclaim, and other foreign editions soon followed. This made the secret police yet more suspicious of him, and for two years he was banished to a remote village, to learn about the lives of workers and peasants. In 1977, he wrote "The Great Winter", which lauded the regime, in an apparent effort to save his skin. Four years later, however, he produced "The Palace of Dreams", regarded by many as his masterpiece. Set in Albania during Ottoman Turk rule, it is about a vast bureaucracy dedicated to sifting through people's dreams in search of dissident thought. His reputation abroad seems to have protected him. Nevertheless, even after Hoxha's death in 1985, he continued to live in fear of denunciation and reprisal – and in 1990, he defected to Paris. Later, he was accused of having been a collaborator. His retort, in memoirs and interviews, was that he'd resisted through his writing. "Every time I wrote a book," he said, "I had the impression that I was thrusting a dagger into the dictatorship."