This Week’s Reading, 5.8.12

What the world thought of Danny Boyle’s Olympic ceremony, Jack Kerouac’s sexy correspondence, and Brian Catling at The Royal Albert Hall.

• Leader image: Detail from Zena Assi’s Cities series. Full version here.

• “Because Great Britain has self-confidence, it doesn’t need a monumental Olympics. But for China that was the only imaginable kind…” – Ai Weiwei reviews the London 2012 opening ceremony.

• A US perspective: Was London Olympics Opening Ceremony A ‘Socialist’ Spectacle?

• France in the year 2000, as imagined by illustrators in 1900.

• Sexy letter between Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac.

• One year on from the London riots, ‘Riot City Fallout’ by Michael Keenaghan takes us back.

• A rare Nabokov story about boxing published for first time in English.

• Bukowski hanging out with Penn.

• The real Olympics: The Twelfth Man Project – photos of everyday Londoners in their best sporting gear.

• Stewart Lee on Harry Potter.

• How a convicted murderer found his true calling as a jail house reporter and magazine co-founder.

• And finally, Brian Catling‘s mesmerising performance at The Royal Albert Hall in 1993.