Withdraw the words “melt”, “limb”, “hair”, “sex” and “tired” from your vocabulary and you’ve got precious little left to say about Tate Modern’s new show, Surrealism: desire unbound. This gargantuan sprawl of an exhibition offers a major historical survey of the Surrealist movement from the 1920s onwards, with emphasis on the erotic imagination. Oh to be 15 again, and in the first flush of awe for Dali’s mercurified landscapes, or the clunky adolescent symbolism of Magritte and de Chirico. But there’s no turning the clock back, however liquefied the timepiece.

Many of the classic pieces are here: Duchamp’s Mona Lisa postcard with its scribbled moustache and goatee; Man Ray’s long-lashed eye, paper-clipped to a metronome; Dal!‘s “Lobster Telephone”; Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacup and saucer. There’s also some violent and sexually explicit material (such as Masson’s illustrations for the Marquis de Sade’s works). This exhibition is emphatically unsuitable for children. You may want to check the displays out, even before bringing A-level students.

Worth a visit, though, for the Mir“s, some early Giacomettis, the odd surprise - such as Mimi Parent’s “Mistress”, a leather whip, ending in two saucy blonde plaits - and an excellent selection of work by Dorothea Tanning. Now aged 91, Tanning offers the intriguing image of girls in shredded clothing dragging a giant sunflower down a hotel corridor; and Rainy-Day Canape, a life-size tweed sofa making out with itself, couch and human melding into one in a snarl of lustful upholstery.

Surrealism: desire unbound is at Tate Modern, London, until January 1, 2002. Group tickets from 020 7887 8888. Website: www.tate.org.uksurrealism Talks and screenings of surrealist film classics run throughout the autumn. Leading surrealism scholar Robert Short leads “Surrealism: subversion and enchantment”, a six-week course on Monday evenings from October 15.

The Human Body, a large-format film produced in association with the Science Museum, goes on show in IMAX cinemas across the UK from October 13. Based on the BBC’s recent TV series of the same name, the $7-million (pound;4.7-million) film shows a day in the life of a pregnant woman and her family, via their innards. There’s much to learn about sweat, digestion and hearing; lovely arty shots of cascading blood cells and pulsating hormones; great X-ray graphics of the skeleton of a crawling baby. The squeaky-clean, show-home lifestyle of the mid-Atlantic family may grate, but lively interviews with teenagers about puberty more than compensate.

And there are the mandatory gross moments: pimple-squeezing, and the insides of a stomach, filmed using an endoscope, to watch the digestion of a tomato and pasta salad.

The Human Body is at the Science Museum, London, and the IMAX cinemas in Bradford, Bristol, Glasgow Science Centre, Manchester UCI Printworks and Millennium Point, Birmingham. Website: www.sciencemuseum.org.uk Artist Susan Derges spent a year at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science, exploring the collections and creating work to re-ignite a Renaissance sense of imaginative wonder in science. Inspired by Giambattista della Porta, possibly the first writer to publish popular science books (in 1558), Derges has recreated some of della Porta’s alchemical experiments and assembled unlikely juxtapositions of museum objects into cabinets of curiosity. Derges’ project, Natural Magic, was one of three residencies organised by the Ruskin School as part of the Year of the Artist. From October 12 at Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, Oxford until December 15. Website: www.ruskin-sch.ox.ac.uklab Drawing Distinctions is a broad-ranging exhibition showing 20th century drawings and watercolours from the British Council collection, featuring 80 works from 1910-1995. The exhibition coincides with The Big Draw, a nationwide event to encourage drawing. At Milton Keynes Gallery, 900 Midsummer Boulevard, until November 25. Tel: 01908 676 900. Pre-booking for education events: 01908 558305.

“How scary a monster can I get away with?” worries illustrator Neal Layton. “How can I do all the planning necessary and still make my drawings look spontaneous?” frets Quentin Blake. A Baker’s Dozen, an exhibition assembled by Blake at Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, in east London, features drafts and sketches by 13 of the most successful contemporary illustrators of children’s books, showing how their ideas for books have developed.

Emma Chichester Clark (creator of I Love You, Blue Kangaroo) doodles until she finds a new character, and always starts by drawing rabbits. Satoshi Kitamura explains how he spent months reading popular science and philosophy texts, planning to write a counting book, and ended up turning Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing into a crime mystery.

Styles range from the meticulous draftsmanship of Chris Riddell’s Edge Chronicles, in his illustrations for Paul Stewart’s text, to the jumbly eccentricity of Sara Fanelli’s Dear Diary. Even the most informal drawings require detailed forward-thinking, as Charlotte Voake, prize-winning creator of Ginger, explains: “If you can’t draw a cat and you’re doing a book about cats, you’ve got to do a great deal of practising before you can draw him looking surprised or sad without worrying how his tail goes”. Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2, until November 8. Tel: 020 8980 2415. Website: www.museumofchildhood.org.uk Judith Palmer