“He lives in Woolwich and Warsaw”. From which author note you might conclude that Owen Hatherley, author of The Ministry of Nostalgia, is not your ordinary kind of UK critic, comfortably ensconced (usually) in North or fashionable East London. Fashion has always passed Woolwich, if not Warsaw, by, though Hatherley himself is quietly stylish, somewhat in the manner of his hero Jarvis Cocker. Can one extrapolate a whiff of left-puritanism from this alliterative choice of abode? Perhaps, but also a romanticism.

The second instalment of this three-part series on the history of Spain (from the BBC in collaboration with the Open University) told a tale that is probably still relatively unfamiliar in the Anglophone world. That’s despite the fact that one of its star turns was the financing by that fervently religious 15th century Iberian power couple, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, of the legendary voyage of Christopher Columbus.

Glasgow has a brand new concert hall, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has a brand new home. A move for the Orchestra from Henry Wood Hall, a converted church in the city’s West End it has occupied since 1979, has been on the cards for several years, but few could have predicted the scale and intricacy of the final project. The New RSNO Centre snuggles conveniently right next to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and brings new offices, an education suite, a digital centre and practice rooms right to the city centre.

Heaven, or a lot of pagan gods at least, may know what was in the air 2500 years ago. Bettany Hughes has just finished her trilogy of philosophers from that millennium, and now we have Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill taking us genially around Athens, founded – you guessed – 2500 years ago and providing the template for cities ever since.

I’m in a car and I’m uncomfortably hot. The reason I’m in a car is I’m on my way to a gig on the first day in 14 years that industrial action has brought London Underground to a standstill. No skeleton service, no contingency, just closed doors and solidarity. This means it’s bumper-to-bumper and I’m running late. Very late. I’m on my way to Abbey Road Studios where Studio Two has been opened up for a special performance by pianist and composer Tom Hodge and electronic producer Max Cooper.

Linnaeus Tripe? Shades of a minor character in Dickens or Trollope, but in fact the resoundingly named Tripe (1822-1902) was an army officer and photographer, the sixth son and ninth child of a professional middle-class family from Devonport, his father a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He joined, as so many of his background did – younger son, but of a certain social status – the East India Company’s army (the 12^th Madras Native Infantry) aged only 17, the third Tripe son to do so.

The hook for Alan Yentob's portrait of the 86-year-old architect Frank Gehry was the initiation and progress of an enormous new building in a rough portside area of Sydney, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building for the business school of the University of Technology. It opened after nearly two years of construction, on time and on budget, last autumn. To commission it, the dean of the school, Ron Green, simply rang Gehry up, and Gehry replied with just four words: "I’m up for it." 

Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical thinking and reflectivity.

We think we know it when we see it. But how, pray, do we define beauty? The ancient Greeks thought they had the measure of it. In the 4^th century BC, the “chief forms of beauty,” according to Aristotle, were “order, symmetry and clear delineation.” A century earlier, during the golden age of Athens, Polykleitos, one of the ancient world’s greatest sculptors, set out the precise ratios for the ideal male form in a treatise he called The Canon.

When in Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies Thomas Cromwell exclaims in exasperation,  “to each monk, one bed; to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them?” he sums up the state of moral decay into which the monasteries had apparently lapsed by the time of their dissolution. They had, we are told, become dens of iniquity, the monks indulging in every vice and pleasure they were supposed to abstain from, and in command of such monstrous power and wealth that it is hard not to feel that maybe Henry VIII had a point.