1992 witnessed the first cohort of students entering the Degree in Editorial Photography, as it was then called at the University of Brighton. 2013 marks the 21 st Anniversary of the establishment of the course. To celebrate this, the University are aiming to raise money for two books - one...

I recently went to a Strypes gig at the Lexington pub in north London. The band, who are by all accounts doing very well and will almost certainly 'go places', were excellent. (Technically, as well as in terms of showmanship and energy). Great fun.

But I kept thinking, if...

God's Property is a new play set in 1982 - a time of inner city tensions, unemployment and riots. The timing of the play, written by Soho Six writer Arinze Kene, is apt.

Set in Deptford in South London, we're a long way from the big bang, yuppies or...

I've always found most classical music reviews difficult, not to mention dull. Whether, say, the strings are slightly overpowering the woodwind or the tempo is too quick on the third movement seems to miss the wider point. These reviews often descend into the pedantic navel gazing of a wine critique...

Describing Lady Rizo is a bit like trying to explain 'Django Unchained' or 'Pulp Fiction' to someone who has never seen a Tarantino movie. Both deliberately push against categorisation. She's funny, yes, but not at the expense of being dark and thoughtful. She's occasionally disgusting, yes, but also sensual and...

I remember going to see Jerry Springer the Opera at the Fringe Festival Edinburgh. There were protesters outside urging anyone with a ticket to disregard the blasphemous performance inside. I thought the fact that the opera could attract any public attention - never mind genuine outrage - was quite novel....

Love, according to who you listen to, is an invention of nineteenth-century romantics, a clever ploy by 1950s ad men or simply a trick biology plays on us. Yet we generally continue to think of love as a force for good: it's something which, at its worst, leads to the...

Prom 33 highlights the often futile attempt to analyse, de-construct and review a piece of music. The prelude to Wagner's 'Tristan and Isolde' opened the performance. The piece is sensuous and rich; aching; gasping; struggling and straining to resolve. It's a rich oceanic sound which flows over the listener -...

Danny Boyle's messianic opening to the Olympic Games gave the world a view of Britain. It was an image of an island rudely awakened from an idyllic pastoral slumber by an eruption of steam power, coal fired furnaces and soot covered satanic mills. The scale of industrial Britain has already...

Kenneth Clark once noted that he could not describe 'civilisation' - but he knew it when he saw it. With Beethoven's fifth, sixth and ninth symphonies, I wouldn't attempt to form any description of what human civilisation is or represents - but I know it when I hear it. It...

London in 2012, the year of the Olympics, is as good a time as any to reflect on the changing nature of the city. The capital remains a mess of constant developments, movements and fluctuations. As the recent BBC series The Secret History of Our Streets has highlighted, areas once...

The beginning of the last century, on the surface of things, was a time of pomp and ceremony; of military parades, imperial regalia, flag waving and staid order. Yet far from being symbols of stability, these represented a growing unease felt by ruling elites in a world where the existing...

Alastair Campbell noted in the first of his published diaries that students with an interest in politics might find the diaries of value in years to come. Indeed, their purpose seems almost instructive - an exposé of the often unplanned, reactive and petty nature of government, alongside high diplomacy and...

The German democracy which is now doing its best to prop up the rest of Europe, was one which emerged, phoenix-like, from the devastation of the Second World War. It was a nation which had to confront both Past and Present; East and West. Its loyalties were muddled; it was...

The Ukraine has, long before the England football team's fantastic visions of the semi-finals, been the subject of another sort of vision. A utopian vision which saw the territory being populated by thousands of sturdy peasants who would occupy and cultivate the soil; construct bustling highways studded with prosperous towns....

This year all of London is a stage: from the pomp and pageantry of the Jubilee barge sailing regally down the Thames, to the heart pounding action of the Olympic Games. The biggest Shakespeare festival the world has seen is also being staged. The playwright is, of course, famous for...

We are currently living through an apparent contradiction. On the face of it public opinion has never been stronger. Information moves at a startling pace, interacting with and increasingly being defined by the users who consume it. Yet at the same time we have rarely seen, since the collapse of...

The debate around Scottish independence is one which the Scottish Nationalists have of late, like it or not, done an excellent job of defining, driving and dominating. Their membership has rocketed; their leader, Alex Salmond, is widely praised and showered with awards; the nationalists are listened to. It is also...

Damien Hirst's retrospective currently showing at the Tate Modern begins with a few tired attempts from his early career. One work, for example, is nothing more than a set of pots painted in bright colours and hung from a wall. Clearly it's often difficult to predict later greatness (or even...

Damien Hirst. The reputation loudly precedes the not-so-young British artist like some diamond encrusted Triumph of skulls, formaldehyde and sacred cows. It's a shiny, bloody and very, very expensive orgy. Hirst has earned infamy for what many saw as a ridiculously over the top sale of 218 of his works...