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 ...

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

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

Arts: Commonplace, the modernist, 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 a raw moment at the close of The Ladies Football Club which brings home how drastically life has changed in the last century. Violet, the instigator of a Sheffield munitions factory’s women’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...