Arts: Commonplace, the modernist, Manchester.

This brilliantly conceived prelude to Britten’s elementally powerful Peter Grimes (1945) is the invention of the production’s ...

This was the question preoccupying Britain in the long, hot summer of 1995, and is the subject of the gripping, visually stunning and splendidly funny play, The Battle, currently running at Manchester ...

At the centre sits a circular playing area occupied only by a bar. Pumps draped in towels, stools stacked upside down, waiting to open. Two carpeted runways lead into the circle, creating a tight ...

There’s an episode of the 90s hit comedy Father Ted where the lads on Craggy Island are visited by ...

The Ladies Football Club is at Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, until March 28, 2026. For more information, follow this link: ...

It was a wet and cold winter lunchtime in Durham and I was hungry. A stranger in town, I had two hours to kill before my train so I consulted my trusty Harden’s Guide. The app has a useful search ...

Most people already know this story, or think they do. The history of Joy Division and New Order has been told so often that it’s hardened into one of Manchester’s defining narratives, both a starting ...

What’s that you say? You don’t know much about opera and you don’t think it’s for you? Well, let me tell you, it is for you, as English National Opera (ENO) admirably demonstrated with its splendid ...

The original 1897 version of War of the Worlds is often seen as a critique of Victorian imperialism. H.G. Wells putting pen to paper in literary protest at the destructive power of European ...

Just after I arrive to interview Nick Vorstermans, the woodworker who has carved out a corner for beautiful things at Studio Critical: in Chorlton, a couple walk in and I witness an exchange that ...

Between the start of World War One and the end of World War Two, an estimated 90-100 million people died as a result of the conflicts or the regimes connected to them. Those 31 years were almost ...