JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Mesmerically soothing soundscapes
GEORGE FOGARTY highly recommends the Darbar Festival at the Barbican
VIRTUOSOS: Ramana Batachandran and Sabir Khan
[Rehmat Rayatt/Barbican] 
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes an exuberant blend of emotion and analysis that captures the politics and contrarian nature of the French composer
ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician
Sabir Khan and Ramana Batachandran
The Darbar Festival
Barbican Centre
DARBAR is a musical scale within the classical Indian tradition, used as a basis for ragas, improvised pieces of music around a melodic framework.
But it refers also to the overall tradition and heritage of the music, a heritage the Darbar festival has now been bringing to London for 16 years.
The festival was founded in memory of Gurmit Singh Ju Virdee, a master tabla teacher born in the Punjab, and raised in Kenya, who moved to Southall in the 1970s where he would teach tabla classes to as many as 50 students at a time, before eventually settling in Leicester.
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