The world-famous dancer and former star of the Royal Ballet, Sylvie Guillem, has strongly criticised Britain’s biggest dance company, and revealed her dislike of its recently departed director, in an astonishingly frank interview with The Independent.

The Gatekeepers (101 mins, 15)

Holmes and the mystery of sexuality in the Sixties

Fiona Shaw is rightly renowned for her dazzling ability to bring poetry to the stage. Her one-woman performance of The Waste Land was an extraordinary feat of psychic ventriloquism.

When she's not directing adult theatre of extraordinary rigour and imaginative reach, Katie Mitchell does a smart line in children's Christmas shows.

The rock-climber, who gave the sport mass appeal but was beset by inner demons, has died at 52

After 16 days of sporting heroism which made London the centre of the world, the curtain fell on the 30th Olympics last night with a display of exuberant – at times anarchic – revelry that had but one message: Bye world, we hope you as good a time as we did. Now let's dance.

Is it acceptable, given the current climate, to pay upwards of £300 for a pair of ballet flats? I doubt the lovely people at my bank would think so, but let me explain…

She was a commercial novelist with an unfussy style that helped her sell millions

Last year Alex Caggegi was an ordinary teenager from a state school in the North of England with one difference: he dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. Now he has become only the fourth Briton in history to win a place at Moscow's prestigious Bolshoi Academy.

The Royal Ballet's Beatrix Stix-Brunell replaced an injured Marianela Nuñez as Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

On entering a library you expect to see books – but do you expect them to be alive? Living, breathing books, side-by-side with the paper variety, waiting to be read?

The venerated ballerina had better watch her step – a new programme at Sadler's Wells shows that men could be about to steal the limelight for good

Frank Capra's classic film It's a Wonderful Life has become as established  a landmark in the modern Christmas landscape as Dickens's story of Scrooge did in post-Victorian times.