The north’s longest-running literary festival, Ilkley Literature Festival, has announced its 2026 line-up. A host of household names including politicians, national treasures, journalists, novelists, poets, historians, comedians, and academics head to the spa town across 17 packed days from Friday 2 to Sunday 18 October.

The Anastasia File is a disturbing drama and sober reminder of an horrific evil act which shook the world and ended the Russian monarchy - and three centuries of the Romanov Dynasty. ...or did it?

Northern Ballet’s beloved ballets for children return with Robin Hood, an adventurous retelling choreographed by Northern Ballet Soloist Heather Lehan. Friendship and bravery lead the way as Robin Hood and Maid Marian try to outwit the greedy Sheriff of Nottingham. Facing unexpected challenges, they discover that kindness and determination can be just as powerful as strength.

Raworths Solicitors are delighted to announce the full programme for the Raworths Harrogate Literature Festival 2026 which brings together a vibrant mix of big names and compelling stories – covering everything from gardens and The Beatles to crime fiction and memoir.

Budding artists across the UK are being invited to put their creativity to work and imagine a greener future, with the chance to win cash, internships and the opportunity to see their work displayed across the UK.

The Bayeux Tapestry, a seventy-metre long embroidery, which tells the story of the French invasion of Britain and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, is a masterpiece. It has also come to the UK for the first time in nearly one thousand years, to be displayed in the British Museum, from September ’26 to July ’27, and tickets to see it are selling fast.

Soirée One funny thing about loving someone is how much you'll put up with - her parents' conversazione for example, or being sweet to these fools she works with who smoke inferior cigars and think it's savoir vivre, and drag me back to drink inadequately and long past my bedtime, and put on records (God!) stuff like Ray Conniff.

In 2026, good news feels increasingly precious, so Team Dresch’s return is worth celebrating. Thirty years after their last full-length, the legendary queercore punks are back with Furthermore, out via Jealous Butcher Records on 18 September.

There is real rhythmic pulse and energy here, and a textural detail in Ax's piano playing that is a constant pleasure — every inner line audible, every line singing, with a beauty in the phrasing that never tips into preciousness. The Leonore Overture in particular sounds astonishingly orchestral in this reduced scoring; the changes of tempo are superbly judged, the observation feels authentic rather than merely careful, and the playing throughout is slick and fabulous in its precision.

There are worse places to sit with a new recording than a terrace above Cascais, the Atlantic gleaming below, a lighthouse standing sentinel over the fishing boats and the marina traffic beneath it. I had gone there for the view. It was the music, in the end, that did the travelling — from Kingston to Port of Spain, Tokyo to Skopje, Paris to small-town America, all before the lighthouse had finished its next sweep.

There is a particular pleasure in hearing pieces you already know intimately played as though for the first time, and that is exactly what violinist Sonia Lee and Grammy-nominated pianist Benjamin Loeb achieve on Heartstrings, a programme of favourites and encores that most collectors will already own in one guise or another, scattered across a dozen different discs, but rarely gathered together as satisfyingly as this.

Nine awards will fund a dozen new productions, eight commissions and 200 performances, reshaping the region's theatre landscape for years to come.

I never got to see Glenn Close as Norman Desmond in Sunset Boulevard – my loss I fear – however, I did see her amazing understudy Ria Jones, leaving me with a huge sense of excitement and anticipation almost nine years on, for last night’s reincarnation of the Lloyd Webber classic: how disappointed I was.

There are some interviews where you spend the first few minutes establishing a connection. Then there are the ones where, despite the years that have passed, you simply pick up where you left off. My history with Clark Datchler goes back to the Johnny Hates Jazz comeback campaign.

Operation Mincemeat at Leeds Grand is a delight from start to finish. Directed by Robert Hastie, it is witty, inventive, silly and surprisingly moving. This true story was first told in paper form by Ben Macintyre and was followed in 2021 by a highly successful film by Michelle Ashford.

King Lear, probably the greatest of all the Shakespearean tragedies, is a play about power, family relationships, suffering and betrayal, but tonight, above all else, it became a deeply human story. Ian McDiarmid takes the title role and completely makes it his own, skilfully depicting Lear’s journey from a proud and powerful king and father to a compassionate, vulnerable and frail old man.

My friend asked me if I had any books on sobriety. Having never had a drink in her life, she wanted to understand her new partner's five-year recovery. Being the go-to for matters of addiction, abuse, and homelessness (I'm quite the library), I furnished her with a few, assuming that the reason I'd hung on to them was they were the best of the crop. Time passed.

As the veteran political comic takes a new show on the road, he talks to Andrew Palmer about tax law, wrongful convictions and a swim in a peer's moat Mark Thomas has been "standing up" for forty years, which is impossible and also true.

It would be easy to file Brouček away as a Janáček footnote, the one even his admirers tend to skip. Rattle and his forces make a compelling case that it shouldn't be. A comic opera, treated with real seriousness, and all the better for it.

It is, as they say, the gift that keeps on giving. The Doric String Quartet continue their sublime traversal of Beethoven's quartets with a third volume that ranges across the composer's early, middle and late periods – from the youthful high spirits of Op. 18 No. 3 to the visionary strangeness of the final works.

Mahler's Symphony No. 3 in D minor is a work that dares almost too much. Six movements, the best part of a hundred minutes, and a programme that runs from the awakening of Pan to a final movement of wordless, all-embracing love: it asks a conductor to hold together a vast orchestra, a mezzo-soprano soloist, a boys' choir and a women's chorus without the whole edifice splintering into episodes. I went into this recording expecting admiration. I came out with something closer to reappraisal as Petrenko unlocked Mahler's cosmic Third and the RPO, and Harmonia Mundi's engineers are on inspired form

For London-based alt-soul artist Levina, Invincible Summer is more than just a new album. Written over the course of two years, the record charts a deeply personal and musical journey through disconnection, self-discovery and, ultimately, a return to connection.