A CONTRIBUTOR to a Radio 4 documentary last week said the Spitfire was “without fear of contradiction, the most beautiful plane ever built”. He was spot-on. What would anyone suggest instead? Concorde, possibly, but aesthetes have always been in two minds about that, whereas no one doubts the aesthetic quality of the Spitfire. Let alone its efficacy at the job for which it was designed.

For the next 18 months the Science Museum offers an irresistible bonus for Spitfire admirers. A new exhibition, Inside the Spitfire, undertakes to show us just how it was done. An example of the aircraft, preserved at the RAF Museum, is deconstructed, stripped down to its original structure and displayed in pieces, including its Rolls-Royce Merlin and Griffon engines. Who, looking at the elegantly simple exterior, would have imagined the complexity of the structure within?

The whole history of the project is there, from the first blueprints and cutaway drawings, through the process of manufacture to the career of the Spitfire up in the air, during the Battle of Britain and afterwards. The accent throughout is on people as much as machines. R. J. Mitchell, the Spitfire’s inventor, is commemorated with a specially commissioned statue and treated to a detailed biography in word and picture. We also learn much more about the men and, particularly, the women on the factory floor from their personal accounts, letters and security passes.

The show gives the few their due, but reminds us that they could not have done what they did without being given the tools to finish the job. The Science Museum offers the clearest picture yet of what those tools were and where they came from.

• THE glittering surface and lower depths of the Tokyo Burlesque scene are explored with unholy glee and unbridled sensuality by Izumi Nogawa at AKA in London, WC1 (020-7419 9199), from today until Sept 12.

  The Tokyo-based artist empathises with these triumphantly restyled, Westernised daughters of the geisha rather than taking up their defence. But then, these gorgeous dream figures, pastel-shaded and scattered with flowers, seem in little need of defence: Nogawa’s is a world where the senses reign supreme.

  Instead, she looks with an analytic but sympathetic eye on the confluence, so evident in Tokyo, between Western standards of beauty, glamour and sexiness, and the more traditionally Japanese values of the genteel and even allegedly chaste geisha. She would maintain that the geisha herself, so often portrayed in Western myth as a completely submissive love-slave, was usually an independent woman playing an elaborately formalised game. If Japanese showgirls today do much the same thing, who is complaining?

• THERE is something about cats that makes veterans of the art market go all soft and silly. Chris Beetles’s annual Louis Wain and Summer Cat Show (SW1, 020-7839 7551, until Sept 3) is still going strong there after years. This year there are some 70 pieces by the dementedly productive Louis Wain, among some 200 by later artists. Not all of them have specialised to Wain’s frantic degree in cat images: Ronald Searle, for instance, has drawn cats with special sympathy, but is more interested in wine and its aficionados.

  But then recent converts such as Susan Herbert, whose Van Gogh cat with pipe and bandaged ear dominates the show’s invitation card, Geraldine Girvan, or this year’s newcomer, Ann Mortimer, seem to lack little of Wain’s fervour. Of course we know that Wain was pathologically obsessed with cats so that when eventually he went mad he started drawing psychedelic cats with quivering, spiky auras.

  In truth many of Wain’s works are repetitious. A few years ago I asked an Edinburgh potter who specialised in pussy cups and plates why dogs were not similarly honoured. Well, she said, just try finding an archetypal dog.