In her final blog from the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Anita Sethi reports on performance poetry, Roger McGough and the role of writers in saving the planet.

This Cheltenham Literature Festival is running until the end of this week. Can't make it yourself? Don't worry, we can't either - but but fortunately Anita Sethi, our woman in Gloucestershire, will be blogging from the festival every day to keep us up to date.

It's a quiet year for the Turner, by common consent: limited fulminating, not too much controversy about The State of British Art - heck, a painter's even been shortlisted. (I briefly weighed the idea of fulminating furiously against precisely that, but can't quite muster the outrage.) Adrian Searle, reviewing the…

Beatrix Potter isn't all fluffy animals and cosy interiors. There's danger lurking everywhere. Kathryn Hughes on the amateur watercolourist who stormed the nursery

As a retrospective of Beatrix Potter's paintings opens next week, Germaine Greer assesses the true effect of her domesticated animals

Censorship battles once focused on books, but today the performing arts are under attack, especially works that mix drama and documentary. David Edgar argues that free speech must be preserved if artists are to be protected from a witchhunt