GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
ON JULY 2, 1816, the French navy frigate Meduse ran aground 100 miles off the coast of Mauretania in Africa due to the navigational incompetence of its master Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a protege of the French foreign minister.
Some 147 people — for whom there was no room in the lifeboats — were put on an improvised raft to be towed. But, in a callous act of wilful and criminal negligence of duty, it was cut adrift on the orders of de Chaumareys.
Only 15 were to survive the two-week ordeal at sea before they were rescued. Immediately, stories of dehydration, starvation, brutality, murder and cannibalism emerged, when a report by the ship’s surgeon, Henri Savigny, was leaked to the newspaper Journal des Debats and published on September 13 1816.
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
Nature's self-reconstruction is both intriguing and beneficial and as such merits human protection, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
LOUISE BOURDUA introduces the emotional and narrative religious art of 14th-century Siena that broke with Byzantine formalism and laid the foundations for the Renaissance



