There was chanting on Mersey waterfront. Chanting and stomping of feet.

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 ...

It’s certainly easy to see why Boys from the Blackstuff has been adapted for the stage. Alan Bleasdale’s 1982 TV serial made an almighty impact and is still remembered today as a vivid portrait of ...

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 ...

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.

Set in 1829, a new children’s book called Wrong Tracks centres on Edward Entwistle, a Lancashire lad from Tyldesley, Wigan, whose claim to fame is driving the famous Rocket steam engine on the railway ...

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 ...

Relax. You know the song. And you probably know the band, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But can you recall who sang lead vocals on the 1984 track? Top pop points if your answer was Holly Johnson, the ...