The 2011 Edinburgh International Festival, running 12 August-4 September, has been announced, on a theme of the Far East and the Far West. Offerings  include the National Ballet of China, Korean and Vietnamese contemporary dance, traditional Indian music from Ravi Shankar, Japanese photography, a Mandarin King Lear, a Peking Opera Hamlet, a Korean The Tempest, and plentiful Asian composers and performers in classical-music programmes.

Scotland certainly loves its comedy. In addition to the month-long bliss that is the Edinburgh Fringe, just along the M8 Glasgow has been providing its own few weeks of fun since 2003. Their comedy festival has a very different feel to it - less of a comics’ gathering (they do one-nighters rather than residencies) and more of a busy schedule - but it’s all very enjoyable even so. Last night I saw local boy Scott Agnew, a 6ft 5in gay Glaswegian - not a phrase I have the opportunity to write very often.

“What’s the story?” It’s a question you’ll hear again and again in the streets and pubs of Dublin. You can tell a lot about a nation from their greeting; the traditional salutation of northern China, born of decades of famine and physical hardship, translates to “Have you eaten?”, and a psychologist could extrapolate much from our English fondness for impersonal, weather-related pleasantries. So it’s surely no coincidence then that Ireland, and Dublin in particular, should favour this conversational opener. A city home to some 50 publishing houses, that has produced four Nobel Laureates, arguably the greatest Modernist novel, and was recently named a UNESCO City of Literature: Scheherazade has nothing on Dublin.

The Sundance Film Festival: you have to pack moonboots, parker and thermals. The showcase for independent films, whose public face since its inception in 1978 has been Robert Redford, takes place each January in Utah. In April of next year it is setting up a new branch in the moonboot-free environment of the 02 Arena in London.

A highlight of the London Handel Festival’s annual season is the opera, generally chosen from one of the dustier, more spidery corners of the composer’s repertoire. What a surprise then to see Rodelinda taking its turn this year. An undisputed classic, it’s also the opera that played perhaps the biggest part in reviving Handel’s fortunes on the stage in the 20th century. With aria after aria of generous and dramatic vocal writing and plenty of crowd-pleasing numbers, it’s also a natural showcase for the young singers of the Royal College of Music – perhaps the only ones having more fun than their audience last night.

Feminism is a dirty word. Ask anybody. Do they want to be tarred with the label? Do they, hell. The word still carries connotations of man-haters. Even today’s young women fighting against harassment in tube carriages, horrified by the easy access and the violence of pornography, even they complain that fessing up to being “feminist” lays them open to ostracisation and isolation. Yet with rates of violence against women, unequal pay, the lack of women on boards, pregnancy as a cause of job dismissal, sex trafficking - rightly or wrongly, feminism is on the march again.

Oslo’s annual by:Larm festival celebrates Nordic music. Over the three days, just under 180 acts play Norway's capital: 142 are Norwegian, 15 are Swedish, with single figures each for Iceland, Denmark, Finland and even Greenland. Time presses, and hard choices have to be made about what to see. This year, by:Larm also hosted the inaugural Nordic Music Prize, awarded to Iceland’s Jõnsi, for his recent album Go. Overjoyed, but overwhelmed, in reaction he said little more than, “Thank you so much, I’m really bad at this.”

Too many column inches have been devoted to Percy Grainger’s sado-masochistic sexplay and celebration of blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon supremacy, but it’s his music I love. And have done ever since they celestially sounded the wineglasses for Tribute to Foster, his fantasia on "Camptown Races", at the 1982 Aldeburgh Festival (Britten had been an adoring fan). None of our main orchestras has yet taken up a similar gauntlet on the 50^th anniversary of the Australian-born one-off’s death. So hurrah, in principle, for the smaller-scale enterprise of Kings Place’s four-day festival devised by pianist and Grainger specialist Penelope Thwaites.

Chichester Festival has unveiled its 2011 season running from May to November, and priority booking opened yesterday. Terence Rattigan's centenary is celebrated in style, including two famous and fine plays, The Deep Blue Sea and The Browning Version, and a first-ever showing of a script he wrote for television about Nijinsky and Diaghilev, now written into a new play by Nicholas Wright. Other world premieres are David Hare’s South Downs and a new version of Eduardo De Filippo's The Syndicate, starring Ian McKellen. Three musicals - She Loves Me, Singin’ in the Rain and Sweeney Todd - and two modern classics, Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Caryl Churchill's Top Girls complete the line-up. Stars appearing include Adam Cooper, Penelope Keith, Imelda Staunton and Michael Ball.

Every February the Sadler’s Wells flamenco festival summons the illusion of Spanish sun onto our chilled, grateful backs - this year singers are getting almost as much prominence as dancers. But what sun, I ask, at Estrella Morente’s dark, often remote evening, opening the fortnight last night? (And why, still, after years of urgent requests, no subtitles for these pungently melodramatic lyrics?)