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  • The Guardian

    From Do the Right Thing to Swimming Pool: culture's hottest heatwaves

    Tension simmers, passions rage and things are never the same again. We pick the books, film and music in which heatwaves inspire race riots, sexual abandon – and even a chainsaw massacre
    by Ryan Gilbey Jul 04, 2018 5 minutes
    Leveller … Ludivine Sagnier in Swimming Pool. Photograph: Focus Features/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

    ‘I love England in a heatwave,” says a character in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. “It’s a different country. All the rules change.” And he’s not just referring to the sudden hike in the price of a 99 Flake. In works of art, the weather is a reliable indicator for internal turbulence, with the heatwave an especially pliable metaphor. It is called into service to signify everything from overwhelming passions to oppressive tensions, a ripening or a boiling-over. Not for nothing is an entire genre, the coming-of-age story, predicated on the idea that things were never the same again after that summer.

    The pinnacle is LP Hartley’s , the overarching influence on Atonement, in which the relentlessly beating sun is a transformative force: “In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature. Walls, trees, the very ground one trod on, instead of being cool were warm to the touch: and the sense of touch is the most transfiguring

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