As a performance in Bingley’s Myrtle Park, Brighter Still marks both the longest night of the year and the culmination of ...

She was lauded as an exceptional painter. Now a new exhibition highlights something entirely different: rag rugs. Tullie House in Carlisle is hosting Winifred Nicholson: Cumbrian Rag Rugs. Revealing ...

For anyone wondering whether there is any humanity left in this troubled world, I am delighted to confirm that there is – I have just found it in the form of Flapjack Press’s new release, The First ...

‘In folk horror, the soil beneath our feet is seismically unstable’, writes Hollie Starling in her introduction to Bog People: A Working-Class Anthology of Folk Horror. What a prescient collection ...

As December devours the daylight, it’s hard to avoid the winter skies. In the twinkling between dawn and dusk, their restless moods shift from eggshell expansiveness to concrete introspection, hemmed ...

As we approach the end of 2025, we’re looking back at the things that have brought us immense comfort during the year. For the team at Northern Soul, books were once again a source of great joy, and ...

It’s July 2025, the hottest day of the year, and I’m clearing out my desk in the OperaWatch office at Northern Soul Towers. After 12 years as Northern Soul’s Opera Correspondent, I’m stepping down.

As a man who, throughout my teens and student years in Manchester, argued passionately that The Who were simply the best live band in the world and that their 70s’ albums were pretty close to perfect ...

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 ...

Some English supporters at the recent international match were booing the Andorran national anthem. I doubt most of them know where exactly Andorra is, let alone what it is like and what it stands for ...

As a student of literature picking up a modern novel involving interwar lavish consumerism in the West, I’m bracing myself for something rigidly estranged from the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

Contemporary art sits between two forms of repetition. One is the tired canon that keeps circling familiar movements, the other is the endless stream of algorithmic images that look perfect but feel ...