A visit to the city of dreaming spires is always rewarding, but check out Oxford's Hidden Gems for a different experience.

Hope House
Woodstock

Tucked away in the heart of Woodstock, and a short stroll from the magnificent Blenheim Palace, is Hope House, a...

According to the UK's Mental Health Foundation, one in four of us will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year. Mixed anxiety and depression is the most common mental disorder in Britain and about one in five older people are affected by it. In...

This year marks a decade since the Soham Murders, in which 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were murdered by school caretaker Ian Huntley in a small village in Cambridgeshire. It was a crime of savagery, brutality and tragedy that raised issues of significant public interest, media coverage and speculation....

My Christmas stocking included a surprising addition this year. Given my work ethic (work, work, sleep, work) and aversion to dating, my flatmate thought it would be fitting to present me with a ready-to-go Perfect Man. Not, I hasten to add, a giftwrapped Adonis, but rather a new...

Next month the annual Crunch festival, which I organise with a small but indefatigable team, returns to Hay-on-Wye. Launched just before the eponymous credit collapse, the festival continues to raise questions about the art market, its stability and foibles. This year, Jake Chapman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Susan Hiller,...

The art world can be a fickle place, but to Hans Ulrich Obrist it remains unfalteringly loyal. Co-director of London's Serpentine Gallery, founder of the Brutally Early Club (for busy people who breakfast at dawn), interviewer, archivist, and one of this year's Crunch festival speakers, he is, indisputably,...

There is something peculiarly British about our love of festivals. Whilst European and American equivalents continue to flourish, the British are almost protective of their festival culture. We are joyous about our weekends of merriment, in which we forge transient friendships and resurrect long forgotten communities.

Yet with so...

Another festival, another corporate cluster bomb. Or not, as I discovered at the Secret Garden Party.

The association appears inevitable. With an already saturated festival calendar, new festivals springing up like field mushrooms and arts funding down, organisations are going cap in hand to corporations in search of a...

Was I the only one who expected to see Frank Pentangeli wheeled out at the Murdoch inquisition yesterday?

With its committee struggling to land their punches on the defiant Godfather and his trusted consigliere, the Wilson Room was transformed into an extended scene from Frances Ford Coppola's masterpiece.