The walk from Newcastle train station to the Baltic was a balmy meander by the River Tyne laced with foaming cherry blossom and a chorus of gulls. It was my first visit to this former flour mill, but ...

When I was asked to review the 18th anniversary menu at Vermilion, self-styled as ‘Manchester’s most glamorous restaurant’, I thought two things: (a) after 18 years, why haven’t I heard of it? And (b) ...

I don’t remember The Bollweevils. An assiduous reader of the music press, for all that both the New Musical Express and Smash Hits were by then in decline, my attention was probably elsewhere as the ...

Beyond its spotlight on the first person, autobiography has the power to illuminate more widely, extending in the process an invitation to empathy. Sarah Roberts’ meticulous installation SICK presents ...

The act of writing is by nature a solitary one. It’s also – and here I must ask for your forgiveness for what follows – an endeavour all too ripe for metaphor. In many ways, the writer is a perennial ...

If you’re in the market for a freshly-printed history of Guinness family members and their various charitable works, smattered with factory history and fun facts, then this is the book for you. This ...

You know the kind of thing you’re getting with a Shakespearean comedy. Lovers falling out with each other amid some crossed wires. Someone (usually a hapless male) dressing up in ridiculous fashion.

I usually write theatre reviews the minute I walk through the door. It’s all still there in my head, sharp and bright, every detail could make it into the copy. This time, however, I had to decompress ...

I’ve been a bit under the weather of late (who wouldn’t be in the year’s darkest, greyest months?). So a self-care retreat in the heart of Manchester was just the ticket. From the moment I arrived at ...

Words have their own particular architecture. A scaffolding of syntax and a skeleton of grammar that both shapes and constrains the sayable. Dance, by way of contrast, has the facility to slip beyond ...

This month, Lincoln has been treated to Scarborough Macabre, an off-season sojourn to the seaside in which artist Melody Phelan-Clark “regurgitates the strange and sinister nature of the British coast ...

When the city’s fluorescence, its frenetic denial of night, has started to lose its fascination, there will always be those who take flight to the imagined countryside. Habituated, however, to their ...