Fiona Sturges: If women are funny, it's the end of the world

The thing is – and this is patently obvious to around 49 per cent of the population – women cannot be and will never be funny. Why on earth would we be, with all these reproductive hormones pulsing around our systems and paralysing the parts of our brains that would otherwise allow us to deliver a stream of hilarious off-the-cuff gags that would have all you boys LOL-ing, ROFL-ing and other curious acronyms that denote the splitting of sides?
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Neil Diamond: 'I need a woman who understands my work ethic'

He's one of pop's biggest names – but when the lights go down, he speaks to his kids via Skype and plays cards with any 'friendly face' he can find. On the eve of a UK tour, Fiona Sturges meets Neil Diamond, the septuagenarian singer for whom the show really must go on
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Book review: Hope and Glory - The Days That Made Britain, by Stuart Maconie

There was a time when Stuart Maconie's work involved loitering on tour buses in assorted eastern European cities recording the drunken utterances of indie pop bands. These days, when not on the radio, he's more likely to be found clutching a thermos flask and cagoule on the TransPennine Express and gearing up for a bracing walk on the fells.
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KD Lang: 'In the end, I knew it would all come back to the music. And it did'

She has been a lesbian icon, party animal, and paparazzi favourite. But now, she tells Fiona Sturges, she's happy just to be singing
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Russia's got talent: Meet Emin, Moscow's answer to Michael Bublé

He's a property mogul, heir to family billions – and a pop sensation. Interview by Fiona Sturges
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Theatre review: Horseless Carriage of Curiosities, Brighton Fringe Festival

In the mid-19th century, no self-respecting home was without an electric-shock machine, a state-of-the-art gadget that, it was claimed, could cure everything from poor eyesight to baldness to problems in the bedroom.
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Theatre review: Butley, Brighton Festival

Forty years ago Simon Gray wrote a play about a hard-drinking, venomously cruel English professor in the midst of a crisis. Directed by Harold Pinter and starring Alan Bates, Butley was his first big hit, swiftly transferring to Broadway and later being turned into a film. That it has since been neglected by directors has been attributed to Bates's indelible performance, though watching Lindsay Posner's revival, starring The Wire's Dominic West, you suspect there are other reasons why it has been given a wide berth.
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More man, music, and mystique

What is it about Bob Dylan? Routinely hailed as the voice of his generation, a man who expanded the possibilities of popular song, he is treated with the kind of awe reserved for literary giants and continues to be the subject of academic enquiry; his vast body of work is studied at universities and endlessly picked over by critics and biographers.
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Book review: Reelin' In The Years by Mark Radcliffe

Named after a single by Steely Dan, Reelin' In The Years is a pleasant ramble through five decades of pop culture seen through the eyes of a music-loving northerner and told through a series of singles that each represents a year of his life.
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Music review - The Great Escape, Brighton

Brighton's answer to the South by South-West festival has, it appears, already outgrown its roots.
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Music review - Asian Dub Foundation, Brighton Festival

In his book 33 Revolutions Per Minute, Dorian Lynskey offers an intriguing challenge to the assumption that the protest song has had its day.
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The anti-popstar: Moby regains his focus

Moby's life has driven him to drink, drugs and therapy. Now we can see it too, in a photo album and show. He talks to Fiona Sturges and shows us some of his pictures
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Book review: Breakfast in Nudie Suits: Out of Tune and on The Run with Gram Parsons, By Ian Dunlop

No country (or western) for old men
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Book review: No Regrets by Carolyn Burke

Much has been written about the singer Edith Piaf, France's "Little Sparrow" who was famed for her impoverished childhood, her doomed love affairs, her illnesses and addictions and her mastery of la chanson réaliste. So what can there possibly be left to say?
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Emmylou Harris: 'I smoked country music but I didn't inhale'

She may now be winning Grammys for 'contemporary folk', but Emmylou Harris is finally ready to confront the heartache and loss that made her the queen of the red-raw country ballad. Interview by Fiona Sturges
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