This year sees Flapjack Press really grasping the nettle of popular poetry with an array of titles from such household names ...

Fibres and patterns are embedded in the surfaces and stories created by the ceramicist Hannah Sulek. We talk to her to find ...

As Angela Carter divined, and gleefully demonstrated in her celebrated short story collection The Bloody Chamber, fairy tales, though sugar-coated, typically conceal less palatable truths. The same ...

At the beginning of 2026, a crowd gathered at Chester’s Roman Amphitheatre to bring in the New Year. Led by Gluteus Maximus, a fully armoured workout coach, Cestrians clad in hats, scarves and gloves ...

The Floral Pavilion sits out on the edge of New Brighton, facing the Mersey with Liverpool’s docks looming across the water. Around it, the place holds that familiar seaside mix: arcades, food stalls, ...

Manchester Film Festival closes with exactly the right kind of film. Not something inflated for the sake of a finale, but a work that catches hold of one of the festival’s deeper currents. California ...

Fittingly, by the time that you come to read this, the physical evidence of Excess Baggage will have been folded neatly away and placed back into storage. It feels especially apt somehow that an ...

There’s an episode of the 90s hit comedy Father Ted where the lads on Craggy Island are visited by Father Damian Lennon, a young Dublin priest and pound-shop Liam Gallagher, who you know is rebellious ...

I should probably admit that my knowledge of wrestling is not contemporary. It lives somewhere back in the strange, televised world of the 1970s with characters like Catweazle and Kendo Nagasaki, ...

My first visit to Shakespeare North in Prescot felt oddly close to home. It’s not far from where I grew up, though Prescot itself always felt like another world. Jim Cartwright’s Two has also ...

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 ...

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 ...