Words! Words! Words!

Tom Holland – history with humour

BATH Literature Festival has announced its first event, a pre-festival evening with historian Tom Holland, co-host of the hit podcast The Rest is History, at Bath Forum on Friday 22nd May at 7pm. Travel back to the Roman Empire as Tom Holland celebrates his translation for Penguin Classics of Suetonius’s influential Lives of the Twelve Caesars….

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Stories of the Victoria Cross

ANYONE who watches the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow is sure to have been impressed with the deep knowledge, expertise and enthusiasm of military historian Mark Smith, who is coming to the Electric Palace at Bridport on Wednesday 15th April. Mark Smith, a man who can read a line of medals like most of us can read…

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Environmental poetry in Axminster

POETRY gigs attract big audiences these days, and Devon’s Villages in Action Liv Torc  to The Tiffin Box in  Axminster on Friday 17th April. Liv  will explore life, love and relationships, in Wild Words for Wet Days. The performance will make you laugh, move you and hopefully inspire you to reconsider our relationship to the…

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Safe travelling with writers

SHERBORNE Travel Writing Festival has never felt more important than this year, when our international travel possibilities seem so fragile and risky. Over the weekend 10th to 12th April, speakers at the Powell Theatre in Abbey Road will take audiences on journeys of adventure, history, nature, deep into today’s fractured and dangerous world. Curated by…

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Can Brazil nuts save the rainforest

PROFESSOR Sir Ghillean Prance, the former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, is one of the world’s leading tropical botanists and rainforest explorers. He is also the founder of Dorset’s Help Our Planet project and HOP talks. On Thursday 26th March he will be talking at Sladers Yard gallery, West Bay, about Brazil…

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Second regional win for FOLDE

SHAFTESBURY bookshop FOLDE Dorset, which specialises in nature writing, has been named as the best independent book retailer in the South West for a second time, just two years after taking the regional prize in 2024. Affectionately known as The Nibbies, the awards are organised by The Bookseller magazine and judged by a prestigious panel…

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Celebrating Hardy’s West Gallery music

A WEST Dorset choir specialising in music that Thomas Hardy sang has just launched a new website and is keen to attract more singers and instrumentalists to join. Broadwindsor Gallery Quire is a community ensemble dedicated to exploring and performing the rich tradition of West Gallery music – vibrant hymns and anthems that once filled…

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Forty years of Strength on show

SHOW of Strength, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, is  “making an exhibition of itself,” with 40 years of posters, fliers, photos, films, recordings, programmes and more – and possibly a performance or two – in The Pit at Totterdown from 17th to 19th April. The company started in 1986 with Double Vision, aboard MV…

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The grand old duke …

WELSH storyteller Shon Dale-Jones comes to Portland’s Royal Manor Theatre on Thursday 12th March with his Edinburgh Fringe First award-winning show, The Duke, for the first of three dates with Artsreach. He will also be telling the tragi-comic tale of a family heirloom at West Stafford village hall on Friday 13th and Burton Bradstock hall…

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