A drawback of choosing relatively or very obscure operas, as they've been mostly doing in Wexford Festival since 1951, is that the audiences probably won’t come out humming the tunes. That changed this year with the inclusion of Le trouvère, which most of us know – minus the ballet music and a few striking changes in this French version – as Il trovatore. A risk, since budget forbade big names in the four main roles, but the casting yielded unexpected treasures.

To St James’s Piccadilly to hear the young pianist Misha Kaploukhii give an impressive performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, accompanied by the Greenwich Chamber Orchestra. Kaploukhii is a rising star, a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music where he recently won the Concerto Competition, and I enjoyed his reading of a favourite concerto of mine.

Issued in September 1974, Hall of the Mountain Grill was Hawkwind’s fifth LP. The follow-up to 1973’s live double album The Space Ritual Alive in Liverpool and London, it found the band in a position which seemed unlikely considering their roots in, and continued commitment to, West London’s freak scene. Their June 1972 single “Silver Machine” had charted and, irrespective of what they represented or espoused, Hawkwind had breached the mainstream.

Back in 2003, when Mick Herron was a humble sub-editor, his debut novel was published, the first of what became a four-volume series, the Zoë Boehm thrillers. Inevitably, after the success of his later Slow Horses series, television has snaffled this character up too. Morwenna Banks works on both series as a writer-producer. And it shows.

If the distance from Festen to The Railway Children looks like a long stretch of track, remember that Mark-Anthony Turnage’s operas have often thundered through the drama of shattered families mired in mystery and secrecy – all the way back to the Oedipal conflicts of Greek in 1988.

Robin Holloway is a composer and, until his retirement in 2011, don at Cambridge, where he taught many of the leading British composers of the last half-century. He has also always written on music, including a long-standing column in The Spectator, previously publishing two collections of “essays and diversions” (which I confess I haven’t read).

On paper, this RSC revival of Ella Hickson’s 2013 adaptation sounds just the ticket: a feminist spin on the familiar JM Barrie story, with a gorgeous set, lots of wire work and all graced with the orotund tones of Toby Stephens as Captain Hook. In action, this mix doesn’t work as well as you want it to.

“How can you tell she’s an alien?” asks Don (Aidan Delbis, an impressive neuro-divergent actor) of his cousin Teddy (the excellent Jesse Plemons).

Photo Oxford 2025 presents a programme of exhibitions, lectures and events ranging from well-known artists and documentary photographers to new talent, spread over the town at 26 venues in colleges, galleries and bookshops. In a way this is reminiscent of the rencontres de la photographie at Arles. Unlike at Arles however, admission is free and the weather is less sunny.