The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer, alongside Festival CEO Andrew Comben who’s been the event's overall manager since 2008 (also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round). This year the Festival’s theme is “Everyday Epic”.

Fujiya & Miyagi are greater than the sum of their parts. Singer David Best recently explaned that he "sees it as an album rather than a compilation", but Fujiya & Miyagi’s sixth album is, essentially, a collection of three EPs, combining 2016’s EP1 and EP2 with three sparkling new tracks.

Tommy Sissons is a 21-year-old poet, originally from Brighton, now based in London. He has won a number of poetry slam championships, and has performed across the UK at venues ranging from the Boomtown Festival to the Royal Albert Hall. His debut collection Goodnight Son was published last year. Sissons has taught classes and workshops as far afield as Germany and as close to home as the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was a regular presenter of Channel 4 music programme Four to the Floor and was commissioned by the BBC to write a Remembrance Day poem in 2015.

It’s an extraordinary story about a ordinary-seeming guy. No one can accuse the industry of promoting pretty blond teens this time. Rory Graham, the emerging blues-tinged soul star from the deep south – Sussex, of course, or the Uck Delta, perhaps – has built his reputation from the ground up, working as a carer, initially, as he developed the Rag’n’Bone Man persona.

Historic unsolved murders have become their own mini-genre, with the likes of Cold Case lurking in the small print of the schedules and Silent Witness still going strong in its 20th series. A hit the first time out in 2015, Unforgotten is back with a new investigation of another mystery cadaver.

Bands have grown slack about releasing albums. The Beatles used to pump them out, releasing both Help and Rubber Soul in the first half of 1965, whereas, say, Bastille’s second album arrives three years after their debut (although they released a “mixtape” in-between). Feeble. Kudos, then, to The Fiction Aisle, the newish project from Thomas White of Electric Soft Parade and Brakes. Their second album appears a mere six months after their debut. And it’s well worth investigating.

“Can you take a picture of us looking really middle-aged?”

Two woman in their forties are enjoying the sunshine on the opening afternoon of Love Supreme, sipping prosecco from the comfort of their fold-up camping chairs as a charismatic, vapour-voiced Lianne La Havas launches into “Unstoppable”. I watch them scroll through the photos I’ve taken and collapse into fits of giggles. The funny thing is though, they fit right in. They’re doing this festival as it was meant to be done.

Brighton’s barely a city. It was awarded the title in 2004 without having to build a cathedral, or become bigger than a greatly swollen version of Brighthelmstone, the fishing village it once was, hemmed in from further growth by the South Downs and the sea. For all the relentless tide of London incomers and tourists, and the bustle of the bohemian North Laine, most of Brighton is quiet and peaceful, hardly urban compared to the capital.

Brighton Festival is a fantastic, exhilarating, leading annual celebration of the arts, with events taking place in venues both familiar and unusual across Brighton & Hove for three weeks every May. This year, the Festival celebrates 50 years of commissioning and producing innovative arts and culture with the experimental artist and musician Laurie Anderson, who is guest director.

Enter this competition for a chance to win a fantastic break for two over the closing weekend of Brighton Festival (Friday 27-Sunday 29 May).

The prize package includes:

Although the Ealing Studios’ melodrama Pink String and Sealing Wax was set in the 1880s and based on a play first performed in 1943, the film hit cinemas in late 1945 when World War II was barely over. The war saw a fundamental shift in the role of women in British society and the film’s scenario reflected this in how it revealed a devastating female reaction to an abusive relationship. After the empowered Pearl Bond takes matters into her own hands, it was clear that her husband Joe will not come out of it well.