Sprawling show at London's Design Museum features more than 600 exhibits

"The mind of Tim Burton is a strange and wonderful place," said Nick Curtis in London's The Standard. Best known as the director of films such as "Beetlejuice", "Edward Scissorhands" and "Ed Wood", Burton is also "an animator, painter, writer, sculptor, puppeteer, photographer and technological innovator", whose singular vision has birthed no end of "fantastical, delightful, macabre ideas". This touring exhibition, now in London for its final stop, brings together more than 600 exhibits to present a "comprehensive" overview of Burton's weird and wonderful career. Featuring everything from early influences and "juvenilia" to props, puppets, costumes and video from his best-loved films, as well as illustrations and photographs, it shows how, since his 1970s adolescence, this most idiosyncratic of directors has created a visual idiom that is "distinctly his own". It adds up to an event that is "visually ravishing", "witty" and "suitably erratic".

Burton's signature blend of "homely" gothic horror seemed genuinely "subversive" in the 1980s and 1990s, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. His genius was to twist the spooky world of Edgar Allan Poe and Edward Gorey into a critique of American conformity: growing up in suburban California, we learn, he loathed the "sameness and sterility" of his surroundings. Youthful drawings already show him "fascinated by Halloween and its denizens", while his first film, about a boy who grows up wanting to become the horror actor Vincent Price, plays in its entirety. Elsewhere, we get a cavalcade of props from his "classics", from Johnny Depp's Edward Scissorhands costume to puppets of the "snarling Martians" from "Mars Attacks!", as well as countless detailed sketches made in preparation for his films. Yet the overall tone of the show is a little too slick and promotional. Recent side projects, including music videos and photo-shoots, are unconvincingly presented as "high art". "As art on a wall", Burton's drawings "don't make it". And no amount of gloss can disguise how his early originality gave way to the "uneven", predictable films of his later career.

"Burton's handiworks don't entirely stand up to the exposure that a show of this scale provides," said Rowan Moore in The Observer. The drawings he has been churning out for the past 50 years, for instance, are "impressive for their intensity and energy", yet they rely on the same visual tics – characters with "oversized body parts", "with tendrils, fangs, bones and blobs, with rips and repairs in skin, flesh and clothing" – that recur throughout. And it's curious to note how his most recent work, the 2022 Netflix series "Wednesday", slavishly "reprises the look of his earliest films". Nevertheless, there's much to enjoy here and, for all its limitations, the show does offer "a tour of the phenomenal output of a singular creative mind", who has given pleasure to "generations of audiences".

by Hanif Kureishi     

"You'd think that a book about a paralysed man lying in hospital for a year would be bound to be boring," said Lynn Barber in The Spectator. But this memoir "never is". Hanif Kureishi is "such an exhilarating writer that you read agog even when he's describing having his nappies changed or fingers stuck up his bottom".

The story begins on Boxing Day in 2022, when the novelist, then 68, was watching TV in his girlfriend Isabella's flat in Rome. After becoming dizzy, he put his head between his legs and fell off the sofa – and in doing so partially broke his neck. As a result, he's now tetraplegic: though he has some feeling in his limbs, he "cannot feed himself… or hold a pen".

Fortunately, he can still talk, and that's how he wrote "Shattered": the book is composed of diary entries dictated to his son Carlo, which he began days after the accident "to stop myself from dying inside". Interspersing his experiences of hospital with reminiscences of his childhood and youth, it is gripping and at times unbearably moving. I've never called any book "inspirational" before, but in this case it's the "only word I can think of".

Kureishi has always been the most "unsparing" of writers, and he doesn't shy away from detailing the gulf between his former life and his new status as what he calls a "near vegetable", said James Walton in The Telegraph. As he reminds us, "he was quite a guy in his prime": a pleasure-seeker whose novels were "shot through with a commitment to following the libido wherever it leads". While part of him is bitterly aware that such pleasures are "gone for ever", another part can't believe he'll never get them back.

For all the misery he describes, "Kureishi remains concerned with showing his readers a good time", said Rob Doyle in The Observer. "I have to say that becoming paralysed is a great way to meet new people," he quips. And while "able-bodied" sex is now beyond him, he wonders if he may eventually "be capable of a little light cunnilingus".

Given its origins as a "survival diary", it's not surprising that this book has a somewhat "scattered" quality, said Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. Many of the ideas it contains "beg for a more careful working out". And yet it's undeniably affecting to see the "agony of becoming a burden" turn Kureishi into a softer, more considerate person. He discovers "new empathy" for those around him, a "renewed interest in others". Written in Kureishi's "singular voice", "Shattered" is a brave attempt to "create meaning" from a personal catastrophe of the very worst kind.

Teacher who was one of the Little Rock Nine

In its landmark 1954 ruling Brown v. the Board of Education, the US Supreme Court decreed that segregation on racial lines in US schools was unconstitutional. But in Arkansas, the Democratic governor, Orval Faubus, resolved that there would be no desegregation on his watch. And when nine Black children registered to join the relatively prestigious Central High School in Little Rock in September 1957, they arrived on their first day to find its entrance blocked by a line of National Guard soldiers, and a hostile white mob. Images of this "ugly confrontation" were beamed around the world, said The Times. President Eisenhower tried to persuade the governor to abide by the court's ruling, and when Faubus refused, he invoked the Insurrection Act to allow federal troops to enforce the law.

So it was that three weeks later, the Black students were finally escorted into school by members of the 101st Airborne Division. Thelma Mothershed Wair, who has died aged 83, was the smallest of the Little Rock Nine, said The Telegraph: 16 at the time, but physically frail owing to a heart defect, she stood barely 5ft tall and weighed six-and-a-half stone. Her parents had tried to talk her out of enrolling, fearing for its impact on her health, but she had been determined that this was her best route to fulfilling her ambition of becoming a teacher. At their new school, the students were beaten up, spat at and abused; many of their teachers scorned them. Martin Luther King Jr exhorted the nine not to give up: "You are not doing this for yourself. You are doing this for generations as yet unborn." Faubus, however, then took the radical step of closing all four of Little Rock's high schools, in what became known as the "Lost Year", and Mothershed Wair was obliged to obtain her final school credits via correspondence courses; nevertheless, she officially graduated from what had been an all-white school.

She subsequently obtained a degree in education from Southern Illinois University, and spent more than 20 years working as a teacher. In 1999, she and the other members of the Little Rock Nine were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by President Clinton. "It made a difference in the world," she said of the stand they had taken. "That's the way it should be."