At a festive ceremony on Tuesday night at The Hospital Club in central London, the winners were announced for this year's h.Club 100 Awards. The distinguished broacaster John Simpson (pictured below) gave an impassioned keynote address about the value of the UK's creative industries which concluded with amusing advice on the wisdom of eating kedgeree. The comedian Stuart Goldsmith compered with wit, flair and sangfroid.

In July we launched a competition in association with The Hospital Club to unearth talented young critics. We were clear about what we were looking for: “We want to read reviews that make us think – provocative, entertaining writing that gets under the skin of the art it addresses, that dares to ask uncomfortable questions and offer new answers. We’re looking for a review we wish we’d written ourselves. Surprise us, shock us, enrage us.”

The Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester is an irresistible example of the can-do spirit. Less than two years ago the ground floor of a disused mill was being advertised on Gumtree as a storage space. Two actors who had been working as waiters – William Whelton and Joseph Houston – spotted it and, despite having no money, homed in on their chance to realise a dream: to create their own venue for musical theatre.

The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 Awards are so-called because they consist of 10 awards in 10 categories, each of which has 10 nominees. Nine of the awards are confined to a specifc area of the creative industries (stage, theatre, music etc). The exception is the Rising Stars category, open to anyone under the age of 25. Last year's winner was Nina-Sophia Miralles, founding editor of the online magazine Londnr.

The Arts Desk is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. There are plenty of private members club in central London, but The Hospital Club is uniquely a creative hub with its own television studio, gallery and performance space, which for certain events are open to non-members.

I have heard countless speeches advocating the importance of arts education, and making bold cross-curricular claims – from England’s cultural ministers and arts leaders, to the Arts Council and the Creative Industries Federation – but I have never heard the case put more persuasively and simply than by Ronnie Cheng, the softly-spoken headmaster of the Diocesan Boys School in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

If only the recent American election had been similarly rectified. That was surely the thought on many people’s lips as the 89th Academy Awards ended in confusion with the news that the evening’s expected winner, La La Land, had in fact lost to Moonlight – an upset immediately amplified by easily the biggest cock-up in Oscar history. 

It was a good night for British thespians at the 2016 Golden Globes. The stars of The Night Manager – Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie and Olivia Colman – all visited the podium to collect awards.

Is Katori Hall (b. 1981) the embodiment of Martin Luther King’s dream? She was born in Memphis, the city where King died. The Mountaintop, her play about his last night alive, had its world premiere at Theatre 503, a tiny pub stage in south London. But the unanimity of the reviews, combined with the timely arrival of a black man in the White House, propelled the two-hander into the West End where it played to standing ovations from notably multiracial audiences.

If the honours system is used to award deserving individuals, its other job is to provide an aspirational marker for the country as a whole. This, it tells us twice a year, is who we want to be: inclusive, non-sexist, colour-blind. From the look of the awards dished out in the arts for the Queen’s birthday honours list, in the summer of 2015 it looks very much as if we want to be a society which favours male privilege. Don’t hold the front page.