Australia Christmas gift guide 2021: 160 good gift ideas, including last-minute options

From presents that give back to edible treats, Guardian Australia and a team of guest editors select the best gifts and shopping options to please everyone from kids to chronic grumps this Christmas

Quentin Blake: ‘I’m not so committed to cheering everybody up, you know’

He may be best known for bringing children’s books by Roald Dahl and Michael Rosen to vivid life, but a new documentary reveals the more serious side to illustrator’s career

‘Extremely rare’ photograph of the Rossettis taken by Lewis Carroll up for auction

The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author captured the famous siblings Christina and Dante Gabriel in 1863

On my radar: Tanya Moodie’s cultural highlights

The Motherland actor on shouting at the television, the memoir she couldn’t put down, and the street food she can’t get enough of

The secret history of Sesame Street: ‘It was utopian – it’s part of who we all are’

In 1970, David Attie was sent to photograph the birth of the kids’ landmark TV show as part of a cold war propaganda drive by the US government. But these newly found images are just one part of the programme’s radical history

The best photography books of 2021

Spend six years in the Amazon with Sebastião Salgado, five decades with Helmut Newton, long months on the road in America, and a year in Covid world

On my radar: Adjoa Andoh’s cultural highlights

The actor on her hopes for Brixton’s new theatre, an offbeat western and the sophistication of African art

Down but not out: film, theatre, art and more to help deal with failure

From Oscar Isaac’s underperforming folk singer to The Good Place, Guardian critics offer up bittersweet culture for when success eludes you

Etel Adnan obituary

Poet and artist who maintained her links to the Middle East throughout her life

NFT beats cheugy to be Collins Dictionary’s word of the year

The abbreviation of ‘non-fungible token’ tops a shortlist also including pingdemic, climate anxiety and metaverse

Neat enough for Pepys: Magdalene college Cambridge’s inventive new library

The famous diarist’s dedicated building, left to his Cambridge alma mater, could not be altered. So architect Níall McLaughlin created a magical solution

Magritte: A Life by Alex Danchev review – a man of mystery

This insightful biography of the surrealist painter contends that to his peers he was a hero and outsider who resisted symbolic readings of his art

Mowgli, Bagheera, Baloo: Rudyard Kipling’s own sketches of the Jungle Book cast revealed

Until recently, drawings made to help shape the characters could only be seen in the British Library. Now they will feature in a new edition

Planned Virginia Woolf statue challenged as insensitive

Memorial to novelist would be by Thames, which would evoke her suicide by drowning

No straight lines: Alison Bechdel and the unstoppable rise of queer comics

The artist discusses her role in an eye-opening new documentary that trails the history of LGBTQ+ comic books and the people behind them