Her dramatic gold medal at the Munich Olympics in 1972 ensured her status in her home country of Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles.

A customised coffin from Ghana in the shape of a lion, and another like a Mercedes, feature in an exhibition celebrating death.

As a punt chauffeur and recent graduate, I spent a summer ferrying tourists up and down the River Cam, spinning ludicrous yarns about the University. Two things about this most beautiful of journeys will have stayed in the river-goers' minds: colliding with other punts and the chapel of King's College.

On the various levels of the Royal Festival Hall, the Southbank's Vintage festival is in full swing – quite literally on the mezzanine dancefloor, where period-clad couples whirl to a marvellous 1940s-style dance band.

A collection celebrating the work of avant-garde spectacular John Cage goes on display on Saturday.

Asked last week to describe Charles Rosen, the Southbank Centre’s head of contemporary culture replied: ‘A god.’ And it was in that spirit that people packed the Purcell Room for this grizzled New Yorker’s pre-concert lecture.

Pinchas Zukerman is a musician through whom history is stamped as through a stick of Brighton rock.

The way the Arditti String Quartet played it, the London premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘The Tree of Strings’ was full of drama, both intended and unintended.

Watching Lorin Maazel in this the latest instalment of his Philharmonia Mahler cycle was a puzzling and unsettling experience. He was there and yet not there; he was controlled and yet not; he conducted from memory but with a curious detachment. How very strange that music he has loved and lived with all his long and distinguished career should yield so little of its spirit under his wavering baton.

An episode of cannibalistic sex is in one way tonight's gruesome climax – Béatrice Dalle chomping on an unfortunate lover – with Tindersticks carrying on in their usual hangdog manner. You realise then how intimate their relationship with the French film director Claire Denis is. They find the gore completely natural.

We're only two songs in at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and already ill winds are blowing through a very delicate musical landscape. Ben Knox Miller, the lead singer and bandleader, is a mite displeased. "How come all your cameras," he swipes at the photographers crouching in front of the stage, capturing the last moments of the barely-there "Ticket Taker", "which I know are digital, still make a fake shutter sound?" Oops. Shush, everyone. It's The Low Anthem.

A mixture of contemporary performance and traditional modern acrobatics, Chouf Ouchouf, devised and directed by Zimmermann & de Perrot, performed by Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier, comes to London's Southbank Centre from 21-25 April.