Front Row

Forty years after forming, two of the original members of the iconic New Romantic band Duran Duran, Roger and John Taylor, talk about their time in the music industry and reveal what inspires them to keep making music together. The annual Bradford Literature Festival is a relatively new addition to Britain's literary landscape, but its junior status hasn't stopped it getting coups such as this yea...

Australian writer Tim Winton discusses The Shepherd's Hut, his first novel in five years. Set in the parched landscape of his native Western Australia, the young protagonist Jaxie attempts to flee from his abusive father on a journey that takes him to some dark and challenging places. England: Poems from a School is a anthology of poems that has just been published. They were written by school chi...

James Corden, who is bringing his Late Late Show to London, talks to John Wilson about the challenges of presenting a live daily topical show, how he'd like to act again on stage, and what Alan Bennett thought of Gavin and Stacey. As part of Radio 4's Four Seasons, Raymond Antrobus reads his poem to mark the summer solstice and discusses his new collection inspired by his experience of living with...

The American photographer and former model Lee Miller had a leading role in championing Surrealism in Britain in the 1930s, which is the focus of a new exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield. The show's curator Lauren Barnes, and Lee Miller's son Antony Penrose, consider her fascination for Surrealism and the artists involved, including Man Ray, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Singer Kate Nash discusse...

Caitlin Moran talks about writing her second novel, a characteristically candid and comic account of a young woman's misadventures in 1990s London at the height of Britpop. How to Be Famous, the follow up to Moran's 2014 debut How to Build a Girl, centres around an instance of revenge porn and its protagonist Dolly's novel means of fighting back. Superstars Beyoncé and Jay-Z, now billed collective...

Snatches is a series of eight monologues celebrating the lives of women over the past 100 years, to be broadcast on BBC Four. The director, Vicky Featherstone, tells Kirsty Lang about her ambition for the project and we hear from writer Theresa Ikoko in whose episode a woman celebrates her 100th birthday as, outside her window, a revolution ignites. Stuart Robertson, Director of the Charles Rennie...

The V&A's latest exhibition includes 13 artworks by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, but far more of her colourful skirts, blouses and pieces of jewellery because Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up concentrates on Kahlo's greatest creation - the artist herself. Design critic Corinne Julius considers what it reveals about the famous modern Latin American artist and our attitude to her. When we thi...

Ocean's 8 is the latest in the Ocean's heist movie franchise - but this time with an all-female gang starring Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett. Does the twist work? Larushka Ivan-Zadeh reviews. As the World Cup kicks off the team strips are attracting as much attention as the scores: the new Nigeria home kit sold out minutes after its release. Simon Doonan, fashion commentator and soccer obsessiv...

After discovering that he was almost exactly 150 years younger than Charles Dickens, comedian Eddie Izzard set himself the task of reading all of Dickens' works aloud. The first to be turned into an audiobook is Great Expectations. The stand-up discusses his love of Dickens and the unique challenges that come with reading the author's work. Guitarist and singer Wilko Johnson is about to release Bl...

Timothy Spall discusses his new film Stanley, A Man of Variety, in which he plays every character on screen. It follows Stanley, the only inmate in a failing insane asylum, as he wrestles with the voices in his head which take the form of classic comedy stars such as George Formby and Noël Coward. 30 years ago today, a concert to celebrate the 70th birthday of Nelson Mandela was staged at London's...

Pieter-Dirk Uys, a leading satirist in South Africa, has spent his career poking fun at politicians. In a new show, The Echo of a Noise, he looks back at his life. As audience members, how does our relationship with the arts change as we age and in what way is that represented by the industry? Journalist and presenter Joan Bakewell and former Chairman of the Arts Council Christopher Frayling discu...

Rupert Everett discusses his life-long passion for Oscar Wilde as he directs, writes and stars in his film The Happy Prince. Framed around Wilde's short story of the same name, the bio-pic focuses on Wilde at the end of his life, from his release from prison to his death in poverty in Paris three years later. Abir Mukherjee's creation of detective Sam Wyndham, a British officer who finds himself i...

Front Row announces the winner of the £30,000 Women's Prize for Fiction, 2018, and talks to her about her winning novel. Sunderland indie rocker and songwriter Nadine Shah performs live in the studio and talks to John about the importance of musicians taking a political stance. Critic Rhianna Dhillon reviews the latest outing of the Jurassic Park franchise which sees the return of Chris Pratt and...

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opens on 12th June. It has been held every year without interruption since 1769 providing a platform for emerging and established artists. This year it is co-ordinated by Grayson Perry with the theme "Art Made Now". Art historian Jacky Klein joins Stig to review the exhibition. Shebeen is a new play set amongst the Caribbean community in 1950s Nottingham. Inspir...

Playwright David Edgar is 70 this year. He was 20 in 1968 coming of age, in Bob Dylan's words, when 'there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air'. In a revolutionary move for him David Edgar is taking to the stage himself in the latest of his many theatre pieces. In his one man show, Trying it On, Edgar reflects on the political eruptions of his lifetime and his engagement with...

Orlando Bloom swaps Middle-earth and the high seas for a Texas trailer park in his first West End production in over a decade, Killer Joe. He talks about playing Joe Cooper, a policeman turned assassin, employed by a family at their wits end to kill their mother for a cut of her life insurance money. Is death, the 'last taboo', finally being broken down by the arts? We consider the recent glut of...

The £23m Weston Tower and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries at Westminster Abbey will be opening to the public next month. Architecture critic and historian Tom Dyckhoff gives his response to these two new additions to the abbey church, the site of all royal coronations since William the Conqueror in 1066. Why are so many British writers setting their stories in the countryside at the moment?...

Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen star in the rom-com Book Club which makes its older cast the heart of the story. But does it make good use of such stellar talent? Angie Errigo reviews. Singer-song writer Angélique Kidjo performs live from her new album Remain In Light, which re-imagines track-by-track the original post-punk band Talking Heads' landmark album. She talk...

French director François Ozon discusses his latest film L'Amant Double, a psychological thriller in which a young woman falls in love with her secretive psychiatrist. Patrick Heron, the British artist and critic is celebrated in a new retrospective exhibition at Tate St Ives. Heron played a major role in the development of British post-war abstract art exploring the Cornish light and colour in the...

At the age of ninety jazz singer Dame Cleo Laine looks back at her extraordinary career. She talks to Stig Abell about her lasting musical and romantic partnership with saxophonist and composer Sir John Dankworth, her friendship with Ella Fitzgerald and collaboration with Ray Charles. Stig visits Cleo at her countryside home, where in 1970 she and husband John Dankworth created The Stables concert...

Iconic dancer and choreographer Akram Khan shows John around his studio at his home and discusses a life of dance, preparing for his final solo performance and what he plans to do now that he is retiring from the stage. The Austrian artist Egon Schiele features alongside a young American photographer Francesca Woodman in a new exhibition Life In Motion at Tate Liverpool. The artists used their own...

Designer Orla Kiely is famous for her distinct Stem-patterned bags and a global brand that includes fashion, accessories and homeware. Now the first exhibition dedicated to her opens at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. She discusses the origins of her work at a kitchen table in Ireland and why she thinks that pattern can make you happy without even noticing. Crime novelist Belinda Bauer t...

The American writer Philip Roth, whose death at the age of 85 was announced today, is remembered by Ian McEwan, his biographer Claudia Pierpont, and American novelist Amy Bloom. From Roth's first novel Goodbye Columbus in 1959 to Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, he was writer who courted controversy and explored complex themes concerning sexuality, Jewish life a...

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer and star of TV series Fleabag, discusses balancing performance and writing, and her latest role as L3, a female droid in the latest Star Wars episode, Solo. Andrew Sean Greer has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his comic novel Less, about a failed novelist who embarks on a trip round the world rather than attend his ex-lover's wedding. He discusses writing...

Ian McKellen looks back on his acting career and his work as a gay rights activist as a new documentary film comes out about his life. Critic Julia Raeside reviews season 2 of The Handmaid's Tale, which has just started on Channel 4. Bill Gold - the creator of some of the most memorable classic movie posters from the early 1940s until 2011, including Casablanca, Alien and Dirty Harry - died yester...