Only £39m to go ... two British galleries are trying to raise £50m to keep Titian's painting Diana and Actaeon. Photograph: Getty

The good news is that the National Heritage Memorial Fund, after a meeting yesterday, has committed £10m to the National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland campaign to purchase Titian's Diana and Actaeon, which is being sold for £50m.
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'More ha-ha-ha than cha-cha-cha': John Sergeant with Kristina Rihanoff on Strictly Come Dancing. Photograph: PR

It was only when I was having tea with a friend who's been abroad for a while (OK, and does not own a television) that I realised the extent to which Britain has gone mad. What is this thing, enquired my friend, called Strictly Come Dancing? And why is it all over the newspapers? Continue reading...

Now you see it, now you don't ... David Cameron has said the Conservatives will not honour Labour's promises. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire

You know the way that Jeremy Hunt, shadow culture secretary, and Ed Vaizey, shadow arts secretary, said that they would honour the government's spending plans on the arts until 2010-11, the end of the current funding round? Continue reading...

Metallica ... Not my cup of tea. Photograph: Javier Cebollada/EPA

I'm writing from the depths of my holiday ... Regular Guardian readers may recall that Laura Barton wrote a piece a few months back about immersing herself in opera. The piece got quite a reaction, not least from me. As someone who loves opera, I was sad not to have claimed her scalp as a new fan. Anyway, at least she had decided to broaden her horizons, which was admirable in itself, and I decided to do the same. Continue reading...

Skippy the donkey on the beach in front of Blackpool tower. Photograph: Don McPhee

I'm away for a couple of weeks on annual leave – back in the blogosphere on November 17. Happy election!

The latest news on the Royal Opera House/Manchester plan, which I wrote about earlier this week here and here, has just emerged. At a meeting yesterday between the ROH, Manchester City Council, Arts Council England and culture secretary Andy Burnham, the proposal was formally laid out and responded to.

Burnham was positive about ROH and Manchester City Council's ideas. So was the Arts Council; and it has commissioned consultant Graham Marchant to report on the proposal by the end of January.

There are some dangling questions - and maybe readers can add more. Continue reading...

Caryl Churchill. Photograph: Jane Bown

An interesting piece in Saturday's New York Times: women playwrights in the city have organised a meeting to discuss their under-representation in theatres in the city. Of the 50 plays by living American playwrights at Off-Broadway theatres at the moment, 40 are by men and 10 by women.

Which set me to thinking, when was the last time I saw a play by a woman? It was back in the summer: Zinnie Harris' Fall, at the Traverse at Edinburgh this August. Who are the living British women playwrights who are household names, or even vaguely approaching the status of household names in chattering-class homes? Caryl Churchill. Moira Buffini maybe. We'll perhaps give Sarah Kane a let, because she died too young. But there's no one even vaguely on the name-check level of David Hare, Alan Bennett, Michael Frayn – or the younger folk, Mark Ravenhill and Kwame Kweh-Armah and dozens of others you could mention. Astonishingly, the first original play by a woman to be performed on the stage of the Olivier at the National Theatre was this year's Her Naked Skin by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Continue reading...

The Glasgow branch of Borders. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Yesterday morning the spring was definitively removed from my step, as it always is, after an encounter with my "local" book shop.

In this case, local means Borders. I needed to get hold of one book and two mainstream pop CDs. And I wanted to buy some book plates from Paperchase, which is a concession tucked in there.

Walk in and you are bombarded with the visual cacophony of three-for-two offers, TV chefs and Parky's biography. Of course they have a wide selection of books, but the place is such a jungle – Aldi is surely more of a pleasure to visit, and I don't say much there – that locating what you want is a nightmare, and as for an enjoyable browse, forget it.

I headed upstairs and tried to find the CDs. A staff member, appealed to, said, candidly, "Our music selection is terrible." No go, then. I tried for the book, edging my way towards the relevant section, where the shelves were full of misshelved volumes and a mess. It wasn't there. I talked to the staff member again (who gets full points for being pleasant). He found the book on the computer, where it registered as "in stock", but he couldn't locate it on the shelves. He told me that the system did not necessarily reflect reality. Bookplates - well, forget it. The assisant I spoke to didn't know what the word meant. Continue reading...

Manchester's Palace Theatre premiered Damon Albarn's opera Monkey: Journey to the West. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

The Royal Opera House and Manchester City Council have announced that they are in talks with the Palace Theatre in Oxford Street about the possibility of the ROH's establishing a base there for the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera.

Rumours about this have been circulating for the past eight months - and Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, expressed support for Covent Garden's being in Manchester at party conference this September.

What's new about this announcement is that it sets down whereabouts in the spectrum of options the ROH would like to sit. These had ranged from building an entirely new opera house to drawing on Covent Garden's capacity for skills-building and training.

Further details about what the proposal actually contains will emerge, apparently, in the next few days.

I blogged about this in September – the comments made by posters at the time provide a fair summation of the debates around the idea.

The two Titians: Diana and Actaeon (left) and The Death of Actaeon. Photograph: Reuters/National Gallery

Walk into the main entrance of the National Gallery, London. Climb up the stairs, and turn left into the first room. Here you'll have the most astonishing treat – the chance to see Titian's Diana and Actaeon, and his Death of Actaeon, together. They haven't been together like this for 200 years. The first painting normally hangs in Edinburgh (it has been brought down to London as part of the campaign to purchase it for the nation from the Duke of Sutherland). The second is one of the most famous works of the National Gallery. But they were conceived as part of the same group of paintings, even though Titian kept The Death of Actaeon in his studio until his death, rather than sending it to his patron, Philip II of Spain. And, though I've always thought of these two paintings as utterly distinct in style – the first, precise and closely worked, the second, boldly impressionistic, even expressionistic – the act of bringing them together draws out just how closely related they are. Continue reading...

Just into the inbox, a press release from Radio 3 outlining plans for next year. They have anointed Purcell, Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn "composers of the year" since all of them have major anniversaries in 2009. We will not (you may be relieved to hear) be getting "complete works" adventures with these composers, as we have previously done with Beethoven, Bach, Webern and Chopin. But there will be broadcasts of all Handel's operas, plus a special Handel week in April; the complete Haydn symphonies, plus his "mature" string quartets in 17 concerts from Wigmore Hall; and Purcell will get performances of King Arthur, Dido and Aeneas, and The Fairy Queen, plus an airing of "much" of his keyboard music.

Sounds like good stuff – only surely it's time for another free downloads offer, as when, in 2005, Radio 3 gave away Beethoven's complete symphonies as part of its broadcast of the composer's complete works. Come on Roger Wright, do your bit against capitalism and spread the music for free!

Telephone bidders look on at Sotheby's auction house during the bidding for Damien Hirst's Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

This weekend, I encountered another world – that of of the high-end contemporary art auction, which I entered in order to report on the October sales at Sotheby's and Christie's. I thought I'd experienced most of the branches of cultural reporting – from the chaos of Cannes press conferences to interviewing Daniel Barenboim in the shadow of the West Bank "security barrier" – but here was something else. Continue reading...

Now that I've recovered from an evil virus that prevented my posting for a few days (I'm talking about my own health rather than that of my computer), I can finally get round to linking to CultureGrrl's piece on the cultural policy of the presidential candidates in the US. Well, such matters are, frankly, so low on the list of current priorities as to barely register, but it's of some interest to note that McCain makes Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey, the Conservative shadow culture people, look like paragons of artistic sensitivity and supportiveness.

Meanwhile, John Adams, the composer of sometime controversial works such as The Death of Klinghoffer (performances of which were cancelled in the wake of 9/11 because some asserted that the opera, about the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, romanticised and validated its Palestinian terrorist characters), believes that he is now "blacklisted" in the US. He receives unpleasant grillings at airports and believes he may be being followed by the security services. He talked about this on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters yesterday and Vanessa Thorpe reported the story in this morning's Observer. Adams' Dr Atomic opens at the Metropolitan Opera, New York tomorrow – the production is by Penny Woolcock, and it will find its way to the London Coliseum in February.

Incidentally, that work – Dr Atomic, about Robert Oppenheimer's invention of the atom bomb – is, unsurprisingly, sensitive stuff in New York. Artist David Altmejd was commissioned to produce a large and spectacular installation to cover the facade of the building, but the Met backed off as Altmejd's idea recalled a face with its centre blown out by a bomb.

This piece, by the way, is not about judicious critical sifting – it is simply a reader's reaction to gulping down the Booker shortlist – which I have done in preparation for reporting (fairly and without prejudice, of course) the result tonight.

I began with Steve Toltz, whose debut The Fraction of the Whole struck me as fresh, vivid, funny, breezy and original until about halfway through. Then, for me, it rather ran out of steam.

Much had been made by the judges, or at least by their chairman Michael Portillo at the shortlist briefing, of the breathtaking modernity of the other first novel on the lineup: Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. True, it investigates the dizzying world of Indian entrepreneurs with an almost Dickension sense of the way the worlds of the rich and the intolerably poor connect and collide. For me, though, this interesting material wasn't quite enough to catapult it into the realms of a really first-rate novel. Continue reading...

Enormous sculptures soar above you ... TH.2058 at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Photograph: David Levene

To walk into Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's new installation at Tate Modern is like walking into a sci-fi movie - a deeply disturbing, rather dark experience in which you the viewer project your own narrative and your own anxieties on to the piece. And, I suspect, with TH.2058 (as it is called), Tate has another Turbine Hall hit on its hands. Not only does it have at its heart the kind of "interactivity" that is so popular among visitors to Tate Modern, but also, with its apocalyptic vision, it seems deeply in tune with the times. Continue reading...