THE words and music of the inspirational medieval Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, a visionary musician, polymath and nun in Germany in the 12th century, echo down a thousand years. Performance group The Telling come to St Mary’s Church, Dorchester, on Tuesday 30th September, at 7.30pm, to perform Vision, celebrating the life, testimony and music of…
PIANIST Lucy Parham comes to St Mary’s Church at Dorchester on Sunday 21st September at 7pm, with Sir Simon Russell-Beale to present Reverie: The Life and Loves of Claude Debussy. This is the fourth in her extraordinary Composer Portrait series and for this exploration of the prolific and innovative French composer, she is joined by…
AN exhibition, at Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury, from 27th September to 10th January 2026, A Life Outside: Hope Bourne on Exmoor, offers a new appraisal of the work and life of the Exmoor writer and artist. Created in partnership with The Exmoor Society, which cares for The Hope L Bourne Collection, the exhibition considers…
VAN Gogh’S Wheat Field with Cypresses positively sings of late summer – an appropriate image for a concert that celebrates the season. To the Idle Hill of Summer: Memories of the Season will be performed by pianist Clare Sydenham, with narrator David Hindley, at St Mary’s Church, Bruton, on Sunday 21st September at 3pm. The…
THERE are often depressing reports of the declining numbers of children and young people who are reading books – but the popularity of the Bath Children’s Literature Festival, on until 5th October, does give ground for hope. There will be fierce competition for tickets to the amazing line-up of children’s authors and favourite illustrators and…
COVID changed many lives, not least for Ros Huxley, who quit her full time work to write, after many years in the creative industries and latterly as a charity fund-raiser. After writing several short stories, she has now published her first novel, Kendal Acts Up, the story of an unusual woman who pretends to be…
VISITORS to Moors Valley Country Park near Ringwood can enjoy an unusual sound installation, Canopy, created for this year’s Inside Out Dorset festival, until 21st September, by Dorset-based artist Lorna Rees, of Gobbledegook Theatre,. It draws on contributions from a range of people including scientists, artists, folk musicians, arborists and Year 4 children from Malmesbury Park…
STEWART McPherson, who founded the Darwin200 Global Voyage to mark the bicentenary by retracing Darwin’s historic journey aboard HMS Beagle, returns to Sladers Yard gallery at West Bay on Thursday 14th August, to talk about the insights the explorers have learned about Darwin and his discoveries from the voyage and how best to carry forward…
WILTSHIRE Community Foundation, one of the beneficiaries of our Deepest Wiltshire book sales, is 50 this year. It was the country’s first community foundation and the golden jubilee was celebrated at a sunny party at Wellington Barn near Calne, below the beautiful north Wiltshire downs and the Cherhill White Horse. The special guest at the…
SHAFTESBURY Fringe, three days of every kind of entertainment imaginable, returns to the historic Dorset town from 18th to 20th July, with a programme of more than 300 events (a record number) spread around 37 venues. As director Rob Neely says, it’s all about Shaftesbury: “From its very creation, Shaftesbury Fringe has acted as a…