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Hull’s maritime history thrusts city into world’s top places to visit in 2026

Historic trawler and floating lighthouse among East Yorkshire city’s attractions as it gears up for tourism boost

A combination of a world record-breaking trawler, a floating lighthouse and a dizzying array of maritime objects that include a stuffed polar bear called Erik are all helping to make Hull one of the top 25 places in the world to visit in 2026.

The East Yorkshire city is on the verge of completing an ambitious £70m transformation, which, supporters believe, will propel it into becoming an international tourist destination.

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© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

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Boulanger: La Ville Morte album review – The celebrated teacher’s early opera is brought back to life

Harvey/Rubin/Dennis/Williams/Talea Ensemble/Goren
(Pentatone)

This early work by Nadia Boulanger - better known as the influential teacher – was never performed and survived only in vocal score. Despite the best efforts of conductor Neal Goren and his hard-working cast it never quite coheres

Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979) is best remembered now as a hugely influential teacher, who spread the gospel of neoclassicism through several generations of composers on both sides of the Atlantic. She was also a conductor and organist, and at the beginning of her career, at least, had ambitions as a composer in her own right, which she largely abandoned in the early 1920s some years after the deaths of both her enormously talented younger sister Lili, and her mentor, the pianist and composer Raoul Pugno.

It was in collaboration with Pugno that Boulanger composed La Ville Morte, a four-act opera based upon a play by Gabriele D’Annunzio; it was scheduled to be premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1914, but cancelled after the outbreak of the first world war. The opera only survives in a vocal score, and for this first ever recording, taken from performances in New York last year, it has been minimally orchestrated for an ensemble of 11 players. The “dead city” of the title of La Ville Morte is Mycenae, and the tangled story of love, lust and ambition among a quartet of archaeologists takes place among the city’s ruins. Musically it references Wagner, Fauré and most of all early Debussy, but the work never quite convinces in any of those modes, and runs out of dramatic steam well before the short final act, despite the best efforts of conductor Neal Goren and his hard-working cast of four.

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© Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

© Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

© Photograph: Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

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Wuthering Heights, Michael Jackson and the ‘Trump effect’ – will 2026 see the end of the ‘woke’ blockbuster?

The president is scrutinising studio deals, and was rewarded with the promise of a Rush Hour reboot. With Supergirl, Hoppers and a live-action Moana on the way, can Hollywood stand up to Trump?

It’s fair to say that Hollywood is in crisis, or at least in transition. Studios getting taken over, culture wars all over the place, and gen AI rearing its head. The last thing they need is an interventionist president determined to wage war on the entertainment industry, as well as no doubt extracting what value he can. Donald Trump, as we know, is very interested in the movie business: in his pre-politics days, he made dozens of appearances in films, as well as on TV. It seems very likely that he’s eyeing a place at Hollywood’s top table after he leaves office (presuming he does).

Perhaps that’s what is behind his most spectacular recent intervention: demanding, and getting, a fourth Rush Hour movie from the new owners of Paramount Pictures, the studio that was recently taken over by David Ellison, son of Larry, one of Trump’s key allies. Coincidentally, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is one of the funders of Paramount’s subsequent bid to derail Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros, with Trump himself suggesting he might influence US corporate regulators to prevent the Netflix deal from going ahead. And of course, in the background, is Trump’s threat of non-specific “tariffs” on the film industry, ostensibly aimed at keeping movie production inside the US. But, arguably, this could also be a way of keeping Hollywood’s top executives nervous and pliable.

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© Photograph: Bumble Dee/Alamy

© Photograph: Bumble Dee/Alamy

© Photograph: Bumble Dee/Alamy

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Forget Keanu: Ulster Scots translation of Beckett classic takes on spate of celebrity Godots

Tragicomedy will be performed outdoors in Northern Irish countryside as part of new festival celebrating Irish playwright

Beneath a stark steel tree in a bleak upland bog, a literary masterpiece is set to assume a different linguistic mantle.

Samuel Beckett’s enigmatic tragicomedy Waiting for Godot will make its world premiere in Ulster Scots, a moment described as a “coming of age” for the minority language, and the antithesis of the trend for celebrity Godots.

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© Photograph: Louis MONIER/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

© Photograph: Louis MONIER/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

© Photograph: Louis MONIER/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

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Tacita Dean on witnessing Ceal Floyer’s final work of art: ‘She gave death the middle finger’

The Royal Academician celebrates an extraordinary moment as her friend, the artist Ceal Floyer, approached the end of her life last month

Read more: Ceal Floyer obituary

It is very hard to describe a work by the British conceptual artist Ceal Floyer because description overburdens it. Her practice was so finely wrought that it existed only in the experience between a work’s idea and its absorption. Ceal handled this equation deftly and with perfect poise, but it was a perilous and naked process with little or no place to hide, or none.

Resolving the relationship between an idea’s inception and its manifestation became increasingly fraught for her and many works never made it to fruition. Therein lay her courage. This is why I wanted to add something to last month’s obituary of her by Jonathan Watkins.

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© Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images

© Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images

© Photograph: Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images

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GTA 6, iPhone Fold et guerre Google/ChatGPT : nos 10 prédictions pour la tech en 2026

Peut-on prédire l'avenir ? À quelques heures du coup d'envoi du CES 2026, le grand événement mondial qui devrait marquer le début de la nouvelle année pour l'actualité high-tech, Numerama vous propose ses prédictions sur les tendances des prochains mois. Impossible de prédire les actualités chaudes, évidemment, mais certaines choses importantes devraient arriver en 2026.

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