Things to do in London today

Short films are where many of the greats – Martin Scorsese, Lynne Ramsay, Paul Thomas Anderson et al – got started, and for over two decades, the London Short Film Festival has been a trusty showcase of new talents and small, but perfectly formed short films. Returning for its 22nd year, the 2026 edition features a whopping 204 new shorts across more than 60 programmes, as well as a bunch of talks, workshops and walking tours. Loads of great cinemas and arts spaces across the city are hosting screenings, including the BFI Southbank, the ICA, Rich Mix, the Rio and SET Peckham. Highlights of the programme include the opening night which features new work from Andrea Luka Zimmerman and John Smith who delve into their own lives as artists across the decades, from Smith’s emergence in the early 70s artschool scene to Zimmerman’s own forays into 90s music and fashion; Trans Sister Seventies! featuring newly unearthed archival shorts charting the trans-feminine experience of the 1970s; My Eye Is My Ear – a selection of new UK short films exploring Deaf lives, culture and identity; Everybody’s Darling: Melodrama in 80s & 90s Punk Cinema – a series of short films platforming women and queer artistes and the legacy of Warhol’s ‘superstars’, John Waters’ trash cinema and the Cinema of Transgression and a night of films exploring emo subculture in the early 2000s. 

The bright lights of Canary Wharf's towers are quite the spectacle after dark, but the business district will glow brighter than usual in January thanks to the addition of sparkling illuminations created by artists from around the world. The Winter Lights festival returns for its tenth edition with a new set of dazzling artworks, installations and interactive experiences, plus some old favourites from previous years. There’ll be a trail of immersive illuminations dotted across the area, all following the theme of ‘dreamscape’. There’ll be sweet treats and hot drinks to warm you up between the installations. 

Britain and Hawaii have a complicated history marked by surprisingly cordial relations in the face of considerable adversity.  Captain Cook famously met his end in a skirmish on Hawaiʻi Island in 1779. Then, almost 50 years later in 1824, King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu – monarchs of the now united archipelago – came to London on a diplomatic mission to shore up support from the Empire. Tragically, they both died of measles while waiting for an audience with George IV. But the visit went well diplomatically. After a rogue British captain seized control of the islands for five months in 1843, the Royal Navy booted him out and restored sovereignty (though Queen Victoria sort of shrugged helplessly when asked for help following Hawaii’s annexation by the Americans in 1893). This is all by way of say that Britain had as close a relationship with the Kingdom of Hawaii as anyone during its 98-year existence, and this led to a relatively large amount of cool Hawaiian stuff being acquired by the British Museum and Royal Collection over the years: some of it, inevitably, under shady circumstances, but for the most part accumulated by trade or as lavish royal gifts. And it also means there’s a good story: new exhibition Hawaiʻi: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans does offer some background on the archipelago’s pre-monarchical past and American future, but it largely focuses on relations between our two kingdoms and the ill-fated royal visit.  There’s plenty of fascinating stuff here,...

East London’s getting its cinematic glow-up as PictureEast Film Festival returns with two weeks of bold, brilliant and totally free screenings. Hosted by The New Black Film Collective, the festival brings indie gems, global hits and must-see previews to screens across east London. On the line-up are prison drama Wasteman, Akinola Davies Jr.’s debut feature film My Father’s Shadow and a gala closing with Palestine Comedy Club, with screens popping up everywhere from Stratford to Barking, turning libraries, hotels and cinemas into buzzing film hubs. Film fans can also expect comedy, kids’ screenings, director Q&As and panels led by local creatives.This has proper community energy. So, grab a seat and some popcorn, obviously.

Ciao ragazzi! Celebrate the end of your January health kick in style at the London branch of Eataly, with a two-day celebration of the bougie Italian food hall chain’s nineteenth birthday. Expect tasting stations, regional Italian dishes, wines, cocktails and live food demos, all designed for grazing rather than sitting still. Tickets get you a festival glass, a pouch and a pocketful of tokens to spend as you please. It’s relaxed, family-friendly and built for wandering. Come hungry, and leave planning your next trip to Italy.

Frost Fairs have a storied history in London. Between 1605 and 1814 the surface of the River Thames froze over 24 times, so locals took to the ice creating ‘Frost Fairs’ with markets, amusements, food, drink, games and general revelry. Global warming might have scuppered the frozen river bit, but Bankside is recreating the roistering atmosphere with this weekend shindig. Look out for Victorian games, outdoor performances, artisan markets, and family-friendly craft workshops, including a ‘create your own elephant mask’, and winter crown crafting sessions. After 7pm, pubs along Bankside will host after-hours live folk music sessions. 

Happy Dry Jan! In the past those two words have signified a dull month of self-discipline, with mango and passionfruit J2O being the most exciting non-alcoholic beverage on offer. But over the last few years that’s all changed. The ‘no and low’ drinks market is now huge and London now has a vast spread of sober events happening throughout January. Among them is the brand new G0.0D Week festival. The nine-day fest will involve zero-alcohol masterclasses and tastings, restaurant hopping tours, live music and a one-night-only street food bonanza at Market Place St Paul’s. 

Opening in time for Spooky Season and running through to May 2026, ‘Dark Secrets’ is a massive new exhibition of esoteric artefacts in Waterloo’s appropriately dingy Vaults – and a cracking day out for anyone into the occult, macabre or bizarre. A sprawling labyrinth of 27 rooms, ‘Dark Secrets’ is fundamentally an exhibition of stuff: more than 1,000 individual artefacts, many of them (apparently) displayed for the first time outside of private collections. Ritual masks, cursed dolls, leather-bound Renaissance books on witchcraft, a fragment of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema temple… if your idea of fun is gawping at weird and creepy shit (and mine certainly is), there’s a lot of it here – and it’s a refreshing change from the wave of immersive ‘exhibitions’ which often don’t amount to much more than a blank room with some projectors in. There is a vaguely chronological structure, running from Celtic druids through to the influence of the esoteric on Hollywood and comics. Horror-movie fans, look out for the original screenplay of Suspiria signed by Dario Argento. Along the way there are rooms dedicated to folkloric creatures, shamanism, voodoo, zombies, satanism, spiritualism, witch trials, Freemasonry, curses, miracles, divination, astrology, tarot… it’s like an occult bookshop brought to life. My favourite item in the show was an (ostensibly genuine) Victorian vampire-hunting kit. But I was also fascinated by a room about the collision of technology and science with the...

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

The Natural History Museum is capable of turning in some pretty giddy exhibitions: notably, the recent-ish Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature revolved around a series of fictional magical animals invented by JK Rowling. Fair warning, though: the venerable museum’s first ever space-based exhibition is pretty sober stuff, that steadfastly refuses to sensationalise its subject. If you want to know what an alien invasion might look like or how realistic Star Wars is then there isn’t a lot for you in Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth? But if you’re interested in the actual question ‘is there life out there and how would we detect it?’ then this is the exhibition for you, made with the usual sophistication and care that defines the NHM’s temporary exhibits (which are always considerably less faded and more contemporary than its permanent collections). The entire exhibition is dimly lit, with soothing background music playing everywhere – the vibe is serene spaciousness, graceful emptiness and cosmic stillness. We begin on Earth, with the first galleries examining the extraterrestrial origins of life here. Nobody can exactly say how life on Earth first came to be, but there’s little doubt that its building blocks – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and water – were brought to us by asteroids, of which there are several bits here, some of which you can even touch. The carefully curated exhibition instils an appropriate amount of awe Correctly contextualised, it’s hard not...

Luke Norris’s first play in an age quite doesn’t have an M Night Shyamalan-level twist, but it does take a few pretty shocking turns from quite early on, and for that reason I’m going to talk about the plot in maddeningly general terms, so sorry for that.  As Guess How Much I Love You? begins, we meet Him (Robert Aramyo) and Her (Rosie Sheehy), a thirtysomething married couple who have come to hospital for what is presumably their 20-week scan. They are, for want of a better word, bantering: the sonographer has left the room and they’re idling away the time chatting shit about baby names and whether or not he’s into porn. She’s fiery and intense, he’s garrulous and philosophical. They’re a good couple. There is a nagging worry, however: the two are debating over why the sonographer has been away so long and whether or not she looked worried when she left. To say how this resolves itself would be to give too much away. But what I will say is that as a certified two-time parent, I found Guess How Much I Love You? – which does indeed take its name from the classic picturebook – to be a painfully acute portrait of the stress early parenthood can put on a relationship. Not in some sort of weird self-pitying way, but just that it’s very good and clear and unsentimental on how parenthood not only puts you through the emotional wringer, but how it totally recontexualises your relationship to your partner, as you have to almost start anew in a situation of maximum stress.  Of...

It’s with grimly perfect timing that Tom Stoppard’s undoubted masterpiece – the jewel in the crown of one of the most remarkable bodies of work by any playwright ever – gets its first major London revival in ages less than two months after his death. Not only that, but it’s at the Old Vic: hardly a stranger to Stoppard recently (it ran an excellent production of The Real Thing in 2024), but it is of course where his career began in a mainstream sense with the first major production of his breaththrough Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Arcadia is a tremendously witty meditation on the nature of history, truth, sex, mathmatics and more that is set in two timelines: in 1809, teenage prodigy Thomasina Coverley makes astonishing scientific breakthroughs while under the tutelage of the brilliant but conflicted Septimus Hodge; in the present, a group including the descendents of the original characters try to determine the truth about the events that unfolded two centuries ago. Carries Cracknell directs the final cast of a Stoppard play to be signed off by Stoppard himself. Rising star Isis Hainsworth plays Thomasina, with Seamus Dillane as Septimus Hodge.

The Bridge Theatre has an incredibly consistent track record with musicals. Admittedly that’s because it’s only previously staged one musical. But it was a really good one, the visionary immersive production of Guys & Dolls that wrapped up a two-year-run in January. And great news: rising star Jordan Fein’s sumptuous revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods makes it two for two. After the slightly stodgy tribute revue Old Friends and the weird semi-finished ‘final musical’ Here We Are, this is the first actual proper major Sondheim revival to be staged in this country since the great man’s passing. And the main thing worth saying about 1986’s Into the Woods is that it’s the work of a genius at the peak of his powers: a clever send up of fairytales that pushes familiar stories into absurd, existential, eventually very moving territory. It’s both playful and profound, mischievous and sincere, cleverly meta but also a ripping yarn. While Sondheim is the marquee name, the book is by James Lapine (who also did the honours for Sunday in the Park with George and Passion), who does a tremendous job twisting the convoluted narrative into droll, accessible shape. But every second is filled with Sondheim’s presence: his lush, motif-saturated score of baroque nursery rhymes feels as vividly alive as the forest itself; his lyrics are sometimes hilariously bathetic, sometimes formally audacious, sometimes devastatingly poignant, often all three in a single song.  So that’s a big...

The London International Mime Festival was a true city staple, bringing weird and wild physical theatre from across the globe to the capital each year. Rarely ‘mime’ in the stereotypical sense, the fest brought mind-expanding theatre to London for 47 years straight. The 2023 edition was its last, but MimeLondon is the same idea in all but name, and returns for its third year in January 2026.  While LIMF was staged across multiple venues, the general idea behind MimeLondon is that it’s all staged at the Barbican. However, with the iconic interantional arts centre shut this year for upgrade works, MimeLondon will once again go travelling, with shows at Sadler’s Wells and The Place (and in October a single show Qui Som/Who Are We? at the Southbank Centre, though this listing doesn’t cover that for the sake of clarity). The four shows in MimeLondon ‘proper’ are physical theatre legends Gecko’s returning dystopian classic The Wedding (Sadler’s Wells, Jan 21-24), which was a big hit at LIMF in 2019; Sadiq Ali Company’s Tell Me (The Place, Jan 23-24), a Chinese pole and aerial piece about a woman navigating an HIV diagnosis; Moliere award-winning French Compagnie Le Fils du Grand Réseau’s comedy Bigre/Fishbowl (Peacock Theatre, Jan 28-31); and LIMF veterans Ockham’s Razor with intimate but playful duet Collaborator (The Place, Jan 29-31).

I wonder if the reason John le Carré never allowed his novels to be adapted for the stage was the fear they'd get turned into the sort of trashy touring potboilers that crisscross the country in numbers but never make it to the scrutiny of the West End. It was presumably his death in 2020 that allowed a stage version of his breakthrough The Spy Who Came in from the Cold to finally go ahead. But I’d say his estate was right to give the nod: the story is in safe hands with playwright David Eldridge and director Jeremy Herrin, whose adaptation settles in at the West End after scoring good notices in Chichester. This is a slick and yes, maybe slightly MOR adaptation of Le Carre’s taut, brutal espionage yarn. But it’s a very good one, and Eldridge deftly crafts an intensely interior world, with us seeing the action unfold as much from within jaded spy protagonist Alec Leamas’s head as without. Herrin’s production goes heavy on the noir, and with good reason. Rory Keenan is magnificently grumpy and rumpled as Leamas, a hardbitten British spy in Cold War Berlin who ‘comes in from the cold’ – that is to say, is brought home – after his last informer is executed by Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless counterintelligence agent who has systematically dismantled the British spy apparatus in East Germany. (It is slightly disconcerting that Keenan speaks in his natural Dublin accent, although you soon get used to it). But there is a long game at work: returning to The Circus (a fictionalised...

I have in the past been guilty of suggesting all Cirque du Soleil shows are the same, but the return of the insect-themed extravaganza OVO does in fact demonstrate the Quebecois circus giants are capable of change.  Specifically, the excruciating unreconstructed clown sections – wherein male flies rubbed their faces up against the boobs of a female.. ladybird? – have been significantly toned down and de-misogynised. Which is good! Aside from being outdated ’70s-style humour, it was a really weird thing to put in a show with a substantial family audience.  Anyway: OVO 2.0 isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly an improvement.  I mean, it’s basically the same as every other Cirque du Soleil show that comes to the Royal Albert Hall: about two hours long, with a visually arresting but not exactly vigorously realised theme (insects). You get about a third slightly ‘meh’ clowning, a third elegant but not really pulse-quickening acrobatics set to wibbly new age musicl, and about a third face-meltingly impressive, borderline superhuman feats of physics-defying extraordinariness. If I was put in charge of a Cirque du Soleil show I would pitch doing one that’s entirely the latter category, but hey ho. The best bits of this Deborah Colker production remain very good: at the tamer end, a glow-in-the-dark diabolo section is a lot more haunting and elegant than it sounds. At the more ‘scrape your jaw off the floor’ end, the first half finale – in which teams of acrobats fling each other...

Flex time: 14 years ago I caught Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on Broadway. It was good, although I was definitely distracted by both my jet lag and the fact it starred Robin Williams. The subject matter – the Second Iraq War – was a popular one at the time, and the play perhaps just seemed like the starry culmination of a wider phenomenon.  It never made it to the UK. Or not until now. Omar Elerian’s Young Vic production is Bengal Tiger’s British debut, coming as part of a belated wave of interest in playwright Rajiv Joseph, whose King James was performed at Hampstead earlier this year and whose Archduke will form part of the Royal Court’s 70th birthday season next year. What’s most immediately striking is how weird it is. Much of it comes from the point of view of the ghost of a tiger (Kathryn Hunter), who starts the play alive but soon gets shot dead after Tom (Patrick Gibson) – astonishingly only the second stupidest of its two US soldier characters – taunts it with food, which leads to the big cat biting his hand off.  Although there is a through thread, Joseph's play is best viewed as a series of vignettes or playlets about the nightmare of post-Saddam Iraq, stalked by ghosts, madness and greed for the deposed dictator’s fabled hoarded wealth.  It’s a portrait of a world upended, where the only person not losing their mind is Hunter’s Tiger who is – broadly speaking – entirely unfussed about having been killed. There is the vaguest suggestion of tigerishness in...

Feature: I went to the new Punchdrunk show and I’m not allowed to review it but here are some things I can tell you about it anyway Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett on Lander 23: ‘it’s high stakes, high adrenaline’. Post 2022’s The Burnt City, immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk seem genuinely liberated by apparently ditching the mask-based format that’s defined most of their previous body of work. Viola’s Room (2024) was a focussed and unnerving hourlong plunge into a twisted fairytale; and Lander 23 is something completely different again, being a ‘stealth based exploration game’ based on ‘videogame mechanics’ that will see audiences deployed in teams of four onto an alien planet to try and find out the fate of the titular landing vehicle, which has disappeared mysteriously. This all feels very new and indeed, in acknowledgement of this the show is billed as ‘early access’, that is to say it’s effectively a work-in-progress for now (and there won’t be reviews, or at least not during this period). Exactly what will happen in it is vague beyond the above synopsis. What we do know is that Lander 23 will run to about 90 minutes, that it’s based on videogames, that it’s possible to ‘die’ in it (you’ll come back to life though), and that the set will be a ‘modded’ version of the Trojan cityscape from The Burnt City. You also have to technically see it in groups of four, meaning tickets are only purchasable in pairs, although if you want to come down solo you can ring the box office...

Alan Ayckbourn is frequently referred to as ‘the English Chekhov’, a reflection of the melancholy that lies at the heart of his plays and their characters.  But that’s not the whole story. Chekhov did not go in for the sort of wacky high concepts that Ayckbourn has been wedded to throughout his bewilderingly prolific career. It’s unlikely, for instance, that there is another playwright on the planet who has written more shows about robots than him (he’s written something like seven plays about robots).  These days the 86-year-old Ayckbourn is a relatively fringe concern, his latest plays only really staged at his beloved Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. But in the 1980s he was at his commercial peak, firing out hit after hit. Some of these works have settled down as modest contemporary classics (notably 1984’s A Chorus of Disapproval and 1987’s A Small Family Business). On the outskirts of this group is 1985’s Woman in Mind, which has been a West End hit a couple of times before, in productions directed by Ayckbourn himself. Here, Michael Longhurst does the honour, in an alluring revival that thrills for a good while before miring in concept.    Sheridan Smith plays Susan, an embittered middle-aged mother who begins the play having taken a bump to the head that’s caused her perception of reality to become unmoored. She believes she’s a model parent with a dream life, living in a huge country house, quaffing Champagne all day and being told how wonderful she is by her...

Dante or Die’s resurrected 2013 show feels like a sweet throwback to the glory days of the site-specific theatre era: that is to say, plays that are written in response to the specific, non-theatre building they’re staged in.  In many ways the precursor to the boom in larger scale immersive theatre shows, site-specific work is no longer massively modish, but Dante or Die have kept the flame going for 20 years now. Much of their work is fringier and more radically intimate than I Do. But it’s kind of the company’s greatest hit, originally staged under the auspices of the Almeida. It’s a series of sweetly earnest interconnecting playlets about the build up to a wedding that is staged in a hotel, in this case the Malmaisson, and genuinely wouldn’t make sense in a non-hotel setting near the Barbican (which has programmed this revival).  It’s hard to know exactly where to begin when describing the show, which was created by the company’s Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan and written by Chloe Moss. That’s because where it begins varies. The audience is divided into six groups - each with their own usher - and will therefore see the six vignettes that make up I Do in a completely different order to any other group. The stories are self contained but with some crossover. Manish Gandhi’s nervy best man Joe, Geoff Atwell’s wheelchair-bound grandfather-of-the-bride Gordon, and Alice Brittain’s lairy sister-of-the-bride Lizzy never leave their own rooms and only appear in a single...

If you’re a non-disabled person, you may never have given any proper thought to the many ways in which the world is designed without regard for the needs of disabled members of our society.  Described as ‘both a celebration and a call to action’, this V&A exhibition seeks to rectify that, exploring the social history of design and disability from the 1940s to the present. Opening in summer 2025, it promises to highlight the contributions made by disabled, Deaf, and neurodiverse communities to art, design, fashion, photography and architecture, as well as outlining how design can be made more inclusive and accessible in the future.   

Pictorialism îs known as the first international art photography movement and this exhibition will take curious minds inside the scene, exploring how it developed around the world between the 1880s and 1960s.

Every year, Tate Modern teams up with Hyundai for the Hyundai Commission – a chance for one artist to share an exciting new work in the museum’s iconic Turbine Hall. The chosen masterpiece that will be on display in 2025 will be announced in the coming months, but previous selections for the coveted spot include Mire Lee, Anicka Yi, El Anatsui, Superflex, Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others.

F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. The novelist might have changed his tune if he’d happened across a young model called Lee Miller back in the New York of the late 1920s.Even back then, in her pixie-cropped fashionista era, the New Yorker must have exuded an unquenchable thirst for discovery and reinvention. Fast forward 30 or so years and she’d been a muse for Man Ray and the Surrealist movement, starred in films, become a famous photographer, decamped to Paris, Cairo and London, traversed war-torn Europe as a daredevil journalist and finally, haunted by the conflict, holed in a cosy corner of Sussex to host arty parties and pioneer avant garde recipes like ‘onion upside down cake’ and ‘marshmallow Coca-Cola ice cream’. She died fêted as a celebrity chef. Second act? She had a folio’s worth.  All of those eras are up on the Tate Britain’s walls for the duration of the gallery’s blockbuster exhibition. Dividing Miller’s extraordinary career chronologically, it’s a time-travelling experience as well as a showcase of her technical and compositional skills. ‘Before the Camera’, shows her as a beautiful young model in NYC in 1926, the daughter of a keen amateur photographer. Walk through a dozen or so rooms and there she is, in Hitler’s bathtub, world-famous and hollowed out, returning to self-portraiture to capture a shattered continent in one image.   If the shimmery black-and-white portraits she took – from a playful Charlie...

‘Fun’ is a quality which seems to be all too frequently forgotten by curatorial teams. But it certainly takes pride of place at the Saatchi Gallery’s The Long Now, an expansive, nine- room retrospective which aims to both celebrate its past and reiterate its commitment to championing innovation in the present and future. The show is curated by Philippa Adams, who previously served as the gallery’s Senior Director for over 20 years, and is divided into spaces dedicated to key themes which have underpinned its exhibitions over the last four decades. Abstraction, landscapes, AI and technology, and climate change are all given their own rooms. They’re populated with works, old and new, by artists with whom the gallery shares a long-running history, as well as commissions from emerging artists.A reinvention of the wheel, conceptually speaking, it may not be, but it’s a bona fide feast for the eyes. Across two floors, each room has been curated and installed with care to ensure every piece in the room can shine - no space feels overstuffed. Adams has clearly given careful consideration to how the works will complement each other, both in terms of colour and scale, which enhances the viewing experience and makes you want to linger in every room. It’s a rarity that you find yourself at an exhibition where you genuinely don’t know where to look. However, starting from the very first room, dedicated to mark making and boasting Rannva Kunoy’s marvellous, luminescent,...

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too. It starts, like any good procession, with a load of geezers with trumpets, parping to herald the arrival of victorious Caesar. As they blare, a Black soldier in gorgeous, gilded armour looks back, leading you to the next panel where statues of gods are paraded on carts. Then come the spoils of war, with mounds of seized weapons and armour piled high, then come vases and sacrificial animals, riders on elephant-back, men struggling to carry the loot that symbolises their victory. The final panel, Caesar himself bringing up the rear, remains in Hampton Court, so there is no conclusion here, just a steady, unstoppable stream of glory and rejoicing.  The paintings are faded and damaged, and have been so badly lit that you can only see them properly from a distance and at an angle. But still, they remain breathtaking in their sweeping, chaotic beauty.  Partly, this massive work is a celebration of the glories of the classical world and its brilliance, seen from the other side of some very dark ages. But along with its rise, you can’t help but also think of Rome's demise, of what would eventually...

You could say that Marie Antoinette was the original celebrity. The last Queen of France worked with personal stylists, had her barnet done by celebrity hairdressers, and set the agenda for the fashion of the day. She had her own personal brand – an elegant ‘MA’ monogram – which she plastered all over her jewellery, furniture, belongings, and even most intimate toiletries. Like many celebs today, the queen’s dodgy reputation, founded on obscene rumours of debauchery, promiscuity and gorging on cake, was created by tabloid sensationalism. So it’s only fitting that a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the style of the world’s most fashionable and infamous monarch should be just as fabulous, bold, sparkly and, at times, salacious. Featuring 250 objects, including loans from Versailles that have never been exhibited outside of France before now, Marie Antoinette Style takes visitors on a journey through the ill-fated queen’s forward-thinking wardrobe, dizzyingly elaborate jewellery, lavish interiors, huge hairstyles and enduring influence on fashion and art today. Alongside the myriad guffaw-inducing riches on display (a replica of the most expensive necklace ever made in France is particularly astonishing), mysteries surrounding the queen are confidently dispelled. Did she really say, ‘Let them eat cake’? (No.) Was the coupette glass actually modelled on her breast? (No, but a very realistic porcelain ‘breast bowl’ commissioned by Antoinette is on display.) What appears...

‘Nigerian Modernism’ celebrates the achievements of Nigerian artists working on either side of a decade of independence from British colonial rule in 1960. As well as traversing networks in the country’s locales of Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, it also looks further afield to London, Munich and Paris, exploring how artistic collectives fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions in their multidimensional works.

House of Music, the latest solo exhibition by Peter Doig, marks new territory for the artist who is increasingly known for being Europe’s most expensive painter, thanks to his works repeatedly selling for record-breaking, eye-watering sums on the secondary market. The show is Doig’s first foray into integrating sound into his work, through the inclusion of two sets of restored, cinema-standard analogue speakers which take centre stage in the Serpentine South Gallery, surrounded by a series of new and old paintings which relate to the artist’s love of music. The aim appears to be to transform the gallery into a listening space, something akin to the many hi-fi listening bars which have been popping up in spades around the UK in recent years, or Devon Turnbull’s excellent and hugely popular Hi-Fi Listening Room at Lisson Gallery the year before last. A smattering of plush recliners and chic tables and chairs are dotted around the various rooms, inviting art lovers to sit and enjoy the sounds of Doig’s personal vinyl collection as you take in the sights of his mesmerising, large scale paintings inspired by his time spent living in Trinidad, observing the country’s sound system culture which seemingly had a profound effect on the Scottish painter.  The only problem is, despite going to great lengths to acquire these mammoth speakers - they were ‘harvested from derelict cinemas’ by Doig’s collaborator Laurence Passera - you can’t actually hear the music very well. A private...

If you thought the National Gallery answered every question that could possibly be asked about what came after the impressionists in their huge blockbuster ‘After Impressionism’ show in 2023, you thought wrong. Because they’re coming back for another go with ‘Radical Harmony’, which will feature the work of the neo-impressionists, including pointilist masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. It’s enough to drive you dotty.