Civilisation

The Standing Pool by Adam Thorpe

No novelist since Stevenson imparts so much energy into simple-seeming sentences through inch-perfect phrasing and punctuation

After a six-year gap, the tenor returns to his first love, singing the Evangelist in both the St Matthew and the St John Passions with Bernard Haitink

The Left has lost its monopoly, but new political plays like Brenton’s Never So Good still reveal a tin ear for language

Liverpool is staging the UK’s first comprehensive exhibition of the work of the great Austrian avant-garde artist, Gustav Klimt

‘Some artists have finally had the courage to admit that they are scared. But we need them to do better than that. We need people with a voice to show that they aren’t scared’

Imagine you are a novelist. You want to create an instantly credible picture of middle-class life at some time in the past couple of decades — a suburb, a village, a pub. Easy: one chap passes another and asks, “Seen Matt today?”

Was it the mud or the line-up or the plethora of new rivals that made it a struggle for Glastonbury Festival to sell all its tickets this year? As a Glasto regular since 1990, I’d suggest none of the above. Personally I think it had to do with the Vibe.