Cultural Capital

On how I went to a all-female comedy night raising funds for women's charities - and it was awkward, but needn't have been.

On listening to the Scottish duo's new album "Tomorrow's Harvest".

The critics' verdicts on Rachel Kushner, Iain Banks and Sylvain Tesson.

All thirteen judges on this year's Greenaway and Carnegie Medal panel are women. Last year there was only one man. Although there are plenty of men writing and illustrating picture books, the gatekeepers in the world of picture books are overwhelmingly female. If the full range of boys' tastes aren't represented, how can we expect them to take an interest?

Reviewed: Peter Pan by Régis Loisel.

Tom Humberstone's weekly observational comic for the New Statesman.

Hayley Campbell reviews Gerald Shea's Song Without Words.

Watching Swan Lake through 3D glasses might feel strange at first, but the Mariinsky Theatre's live 3D broadcast from St Petersburg provides an affordable way to go to the ballet in Russia.

The critics' verdicts on Stephen King, Paul Morley and Kristine Barnett.

A graphic novel about high school angst and killer robots? Hand it over, says Cara Ellison.

Tom Humberstone's weekly observational comic.

Burt Bacharach’s songs have an inconvenient habit of catching even the most committed cynic unawares and leaving them – about three minutes later – blubbing like the mother of the bride. How does he do it?

Radio producer and journalist Isabel Sutton travelled to Germany to talk about W G Sebald with his old friend and fellow academic Professor Rüdiger Görner. She meets him in the same hotel bar where he and Sebald had lunched together many years before.

A young Doctor with old man's eyes, he whirligigged around the screen like a spider playing Twister against itself. But Matt Smith’s legacy suffers from the fact that something went awry in the writing of the last series of Doctor Who.