The Arts Desk is, astonishingly, five years old today. Launched on the numerically pleasing date 09/09/09, its survival and indeed thriving state is testament to the hard work, flair and critical nous of its contributors – a mixture of experienced writers and new writers we have brought on. We’ve also been supported by venues, festivals, PRs, record, film, theatre and arts companies who recognised and supported the value of what we have been doing, even as we have sometimes been rude about what they have been doing.  

To celebrate our fifth birthday, we offer you an insight into what you, the readers, have devoured in the greatest numbers across the various art forms in both reviews and features. Google Analytics has taught us a great deal about your reading habits, which we try to cater to while always remaining faithful to the original instincts which prompted us to found the site: to provide prompt and knowledgeable coverage of the arts, to be reliable and also provocative, to go deep where necessary or, if less so, skip lightly over the surface. We’re nothing without you lot.

The traffic warning signs into Limerick City from Shannon Airport told their own story: first “Giant saga in progress”, then “City of Culture giant event”, followed by “Giant’s diversion”. Had Finn McCool made a return visit and started reciting ancient tales? No, but French street theatre company Royal de Luxe had come to town and Grandmother was walking the streets.

Age could not wither her, or so it appeared. Joan Rivers has died, aged 81. On her 80^th birthday she told an interviewer she’d be celebrating with her eightieth face. Her caustic humour could leave your nerves jangling, but she was the butt of it as often as anyone was. And in the field of cosmetic surgery you could almost call her a lone pioneer, of sorts, for what other American celebrity has ever been as candid about going under the knife?

A pair of Oscar hopefuls that take wildly divergent perspectives on World War II were confirmed today as the opening and closing night films of the 58^th annual BFI London Film Festival, running 8-19 October at a range of venues across the capital.

The crusty old Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, but there’s a new art work by him at this year’s Folkestone Triennial. You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye, but you can through a pair of binoculars. If you peer through a viewing tower from Folkestone’s disused Harbour Pier you’ll see one of Finlay’s enigmatic phrases come into focus: “WEATHER IS A THIRD TO PLACE AND TIME”. The words are written on the grey façade of a lighthouse in that gorgeous shade of midnight blue the artist favoured. 

In Budapest, when your building turns a century old, you’re invited to be part of Budapest 100, a city-wide birthday celebration-cum-open-house invitation. It’s a direct way of experiencing the applied, lived-in artistry of the city, past and present. The absent friend’s apartment I’m writing this from was built in 1913, in Ferencváros, the city’s 9^th District, in what was then a working-class area, home to the city’s biggest football team, and one of the flashpoints of the 1956 uprising against the Soviets. 

Richard Attenborough made himself known to the British public as a shark-eyed, snivelling psychopath. Pinkie, the teen gangster he portrayed in the Boulting Brothers’ 1947 film of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, chilled with his lack of empathy, even to the angelic girlfriend he means to betray in the most vicious way (watch a clip below). He is a predator of Brighton’s seedy, damp backstreets, a manipulator and coward. As the world came to know over the next 65 years, these qualities were the opposite of the man playing him.

Mahler’s Six^th Symphony is dominated by the doleful clang of cowbells. They are an other-worldly intrusion into an otherwise familiar musical scene – unless you happen to be in Verbier, that is, in which case they are just another everyday part of the aural landscape.

August bank holiday weekend is like Christmas day for horror fans thanks to Frightfest who deliver a sackful of disturbing delights in their 15th year. An inspiring line-up sees Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens reinvent himself as a charming psychopath in opening night film The Guest. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett (You're Next) amaze once again with a blend of Eighties-style action and horror.