For the past 30 years against the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean, Joseph Szabo has captured the melting pot of humanity on one of the America's busiest beaches.

Amongst the sea of bodies on Jones Beach, Szabo's camera isolates both rare moments of introspection and unashamed exuberance. Images of tanned muscle men, a catwalk display of beach wear, heavily oiled skin, masses of sprayed hair and shy adolescents reluctantly in swimwear all reveal the dynamics of the beach. These photographs show the city and all its different tribes of people displaced to the coast for the day. Divisions and class boundaries are temporarily forgotten along with inhibitions about body size and shape.

Joseph Szabo was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1944. He studied photography at the Pratt Institute where he received his MFA. He taught photography at Malverne High School in Long Island from 1972 - 1999 and has also taught at the International Centre of Photography, New York for over 20 years. His work resides in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University, The International Centre of Photography and the Bibliotheque National in Paris amongst others.

The Courtauld Gallery holds the most important group of works by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) in Britain. This exhibition presents the entire collection for the first time with major paintings such as the iconic Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1887)and Card Players (1892-5) shown alongside rarely seen drawings and watercolours.

Also on display is a previously unexhibited group of nine autograph letters in which Cézanne reflects upon the principles of his artistic practice.

This show surveys the history of British painters’ representations of the Middle East from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, notably the great range of artistic responses to the peoples, cities and landscapes of the regions lying just across the Mediterranean from Europe.

The exhibition reveals the wealth of Orientalist painting which followed the arrival of steam travel in the nineteenth century. Art and tourism flourished in places that were now relatively easy to reach by boat, and artists were drawn to visit and paint the areas they explored including Cairo, Jerusalem and Istanbul (Constantinople), often travelling via Spain and Morocco, or through Greece and the Balkans.

William Allan: The Slave Market, Constantinople, 1838, National Gallery of Scotland

Bringing together over 110 pictures and watercolours from collections around the world, The Lure of the East includes major works by celebrated British painters such as Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt, Richard Dadd, Lord Leighton and John Frederick Lewis.

Highlights include Gavin Hamilton’s huge canvas James Dawkins and Robert Wood Discovering the Ruins of Palmyra 1758 (National Gallery of Scotland), the portraits of Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips 1814 (Government Art Collection) and Lawrence of Arabia by Augustus John 1919 (Tate), William Allan’s Slave Market, Constantinople 1838 (National Gallery of Scotland), John Frederick Lewis’s The Seraff – A Doubtful Coin 1869 (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), David Roberts’s panoramic view of the ancient city of Baalbec in Lebanon 1861 (Sharjah Art Museum), Richard Dadd’s Flight out of Egypt 1849/50 (Tate) and John Frederick Lewis’s Hhareem Life, Constantinople 1857 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne).

After London the exhibition will travel to the Pera Museum, Istanbul (October 2008 – January 2009) and the Sharjah Art Museum (February – April 2009).

A catalogue is available.

The exhibition is by Sir David Attenborough, and brings together the works of four artists and a collector who have shaped our knowledge of the world around us: Leonardo da Vinci, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian and Mark Catesby.

Many of the plants and animals represented in the exhibition were then barely known in Europe.  Today some are commonplace, while others are extinct.

20 September 2008 at 19h 30

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No 3
Rachmaninoff: Symphony No 2
Alexei Volodin, piano

21 September 2008 at 15h 30

Rachmaninoff: Symphony No 1
Rachmaninoff: Symphony No 3

22 September 2008 at 19h 00

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No 4
Rachmaninoff: Symphony No 2
Alexei Volodin, piano

London's Promenade Concerts, a very British institution known as "The Proms", offer a superb array of music in all genres and all schools, from pre-Baroque to utmost contemporary. Concerts are at London's Royal Albert Hall, except the Chamber Concerts which are given at Cadogan Hall. Visiting orchestras include Berliner Philharmoniker, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra,  City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, New York Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris.

Among the many concerts on this year's Proms programme are: Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi (concert performance; sung in French), Mahler's Symphony No.6 in A minor, Verdi's Requiem, J S Bach's St. John Passion (sung in German), Music of the French baroque performed by Les Talens Lyriques, Duke Ellington's Harlem, Janáček's Osud (concert performance, sung in Czech), Stockhausen Day, Handel's Belshazza, French Renaissance maradrigals, Monteverdi 's The Coronation of Poppaea (semi-staged; sung in Italian.

Kronos joins singers Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Dawn Upshaw and Asha Bhosle for the first Barbican Hall concert of Ramadan Nights. They present the world premiere of their work with Azerbaijan's greatest singer, the legendary Alim Qasimov. 

In this new work, commissioned by the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia, Kronos and the Alim Qasimov Ensemble will each play solo sets, and the evening will culminate in Alim Qasimov, his daughter Fargana, the ensemble and Kronos performing arrangements of Azeri bardic songs.

Barbican Centre
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS

Like Eurovision, winning is everything in Eurobeat and this musical event gives audiences the power to decide which of the ten competing countries will win the coveted award!   Only you and your texting thumb on your mobile phone can affect the outcome.

Competing countries are (in order of appearance):
Italy, Estonia, Iceland, United Kingdom, Hungary, Russia, Ireland, Greece, Germany, Sweden

Fat Pig
Written and directed by Neil LaBute

When Tom (Robert Webb, from comedy duo Mitchell and Webb) first meets Helen there is an instant connection, but it's not exactly love at first sight...

Helen (Ella Smith) is a bright, funny, sexy young woman who happens to be plus-sized - and then some - so it's only so long before the jokes start to fly from Tom's office buddies (Kris Marshall, Joanna Page) and the odd whispers turn to something more sinister, leading Tom to question if size does matter after all.

Doctor Who Exhibitions showcase props, costumes, monsters and creatures from all the latest episodes of the hit BBC TV show, Doctor Who. From the Daleks and Cybermen, to K9 and the TARDIS, if you've seen it on screen, you may well find it here.

The Doctor Who Exhibition is at Earls Court in London! It is the largest ever Doctor Who display in the UK. Visitors are able to get up close to props, costumes, monsters and creatures from all the latest episodes of the hit BBC TV show, including the Christmas special and eagerly-awaited fourth series*. On display is the famous TARDIS, K9, Daleks, Cybermen, many of the Doctor's other enemies and much more.

The Doctor Who Exhibition now has the complete Triumvirate of Evil with Daleks, Cybermen and one of the stars of the fourth series - The Sontarans!

This summer Barbican Art Gallery showcases the work of Dutch fashion designers Viktor & Rolf. The House of Viktor & Rolf presents each of the designer’s signature pieces from 1992 to now, shown in a specially commissioned and characteristically theatrical installation that dominates the entire Gallery. Highlights include pieces from Atomic Bomb, 1998–99, featuring dramatic mushroom cloud-like cushioned necklines and Russian Doll, 1999–2000, in which a single model was painstakingly dressed by Viktor & Rolf until she was gasping under 70 kilogrammes of exquisite haute couture. For the collection Bells, 2000-2001, models emerged from a smoke-filled space in clothes embroidered with hundreds of brass bells, so they were heard before they could be seen.

Drawing on the Dutch tradition of silver plating a baby’s first shoe as a keepsake, the climax of Viktor & Rolf’s Autumn/Winter collection of 2006–07, was a strapless wedding dress with a wide petticoated knee length skirt, silver plated, including even the bride’s bouquet.

Between April 1888 and February 1891, eleven women were brutally murdered in London’s East End. The blood-red signature on a letter to the press gave the killer a name that has become an indelible part of London’s identity: Jack the Ripper.

Bringing together surviving original documents for the first time, including police files, photographs, and letters from the public, Jack the Ripper and the East End maps the world which witnessed the murders and was transformed by them.

Artefacts, including Charles Booth’s meticulously drawn maps of poverty, and oral history recordings from those who grew up in the East End around the time of the murders, throw sharp light on the slums of Whitechapel and on the grim lives of their inhabitants. A wretched maze of alleyways, courts and dead-ends, filthy doss houses and dwellings, formed a landscape of poverty which shaped restless, shifting communities.

Previously unseen photographs from the Museum’s archive vividly illustrate the destitution of the turn-of-the-century East End. The exhibition explores how the murders were a huge catalyst for change, creating public revulsion at the desperate state of life in the shadows of the world’s richest city.

The hard and precarious lives of the murdered women, who sold their bodies to pay for a bed and drink is traced in detail. Case histories from Stepney Union Workhouse records the sad and all too familiar paths which brought women to the workhouse, while objects attest to the limited options available for making a meagre living, from sweatshop tailoring to the phosphorus fumes of the match factory.

As Eastender Arthur Harding recalls in a recording in the exhibition:

“…poor old Mary Kelly, she’d take them up to her room. She had a room in Dorset Street, she probably paid about two bob a week. I think she did pay, a shilling a night she paid. But see she hadn’t paid her rent, so poor cow she was, you know what I mean, she was right down to her bottom, nothing.”

This exhibition marks the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, and is  devoted to the life and work of the man who created the world’s most famous secret agent, James Bond.  For Your Eyes Only looks at the author and his fictional character in their historical context and examines how much of the Bond novels were imaginary and how far they were based on real people
and events. The show explores the early life of Ian Fleming, his wartime career and work as a journalist and travel writer and how, as an author, he drew upon his own experiences to create the iconic character of James Bond that continues to have global appeal. Lastly, the exhibit illustrates how the Cold War, a war of spies and technology, provided the stage in which Bond could operate.

On display is Fleming’s desk and chair from his Jamaican home Goldeneye, where he wrote all of the Bond novels; a map of the Mercury News Network established by Ian Fleming in the 1950s showing where all Sunday Times foreign correspondents were based; the jacket worn by Fleming on the Dieppe Raid of 1942; a selection of annotated Bond manuscripts; the Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver presented to Fleming by the Colt company in 1964; the manuscript for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and a working model of an Aston Martin DB5 made for HRH Prince Andrew in 1966, complete with gadgets from the films Thunderball and Goldfinger.

The ‘blood-splattered’ shirt worn by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale is displayed for the first time along with prototypes for Rosa Klebb’s flick knife shoes in From Russia with Love; Halle Berry’s bikini from Die Another Day and Goldfinger’s golf shoes which have been lent by the EON Productions’ archive.

Noël Coward: Brief Encounter

The lives and loves of three couples are played out in the famous station tearoom using the words and songs of Noël Coward.

Brief Encounter features the Kneehigh Theatre Company, including Tristan Sturrock as 'Alec', Naomi Frederick as 'Laura', Tamzin Griffin as 'Myrtle', Amanda Lawrence as 'Beryl', Stuart McLoughlin as 'Stanley', Andy Williams as 'Fred/Albert' and musicians Adam Pleeth & Ian Ross. 

Emma Rice, director