From students to shouters, the library offers a space like no other

Many of us can’t get through a workout without tunes or telly to make it less boring. And there’s nothing wrong with that, says Simon Usborne

His musical tastes famously extend from Abba to Wings, “the band The Beatles could have been”. But Alan Partridge’s elevation to the big screen is set to bring a new lease of life to a host of artists unfairly excluded from pop’s hall of fame.

One of the triumphs of this year’s Manchester International Festival was its capacity to create a sense of place in an unexpected space. The 5,000 who communed on the Tarmac of a city centre car park to see a relay of Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford’s Macbeth on Saturday night can vouch for that.

Mogwai are riding high on their spooky music for TV hit ‘The Returned'

Her brutal performance set the tone for a quartet of dramas about life at its hardest

"Daora" (meaning "dope", as in "cool") is a follow-up to the best Brazilian compilation of 2010; Oi! A Nova Musica Brasileira! And cool it is, in the way it avoids generic samba and bossa nova in favour of cutting-edge yet melodic hip-hop more sonically engaging than anything at present coming from the US or UK.

Chosen as the soundtrack for the exhibition ECM – A Cultural Archeology at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the music on these six CDs is austere even by the label’s own standards, but no less beautiful.

The principal players in Alex Gibney’s dizzying new documentary can’t resist seeing their experiences in cinematic terms.

Michael Keefe isn’t your ordinary CEO. For a start, he’s only 11 and his board-level title actually stands for Children’s Executive Officer rather than Chief Executive Officer.

Sarah Burton ripped the stuffing out, exposing seams, shoulder-padding and fraying hems and cuffs

The heavy rock trailblazers have set a new UK chart record - and beaten Liam Gallagher's Beady Eye

Paul Higgins's staging of Madama Butterfly is not easy to watch, and nor should it be.