Unless stated prices are per person, and include flights and transfers for holidays outside the UK.
Radiohead in France
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Didn’t manage to get Glastonbury tickets this year? You can still see Radiohead, and in a much more atmospheric spot than a giant mud pit in Somerset. On July 2, nine days after playing Worthy Farm, the band will top the bill at the Main Square Festival, a grown-up, charmingly old-fashioned event held in the grand surroundings of the Citadelle d’Arras, in the Pas-de-Calais. Other confirmed acts include metalheads System of a Down and the electronic dance stars Major Lazer. Getting there is easier than the Glasto run: take the Eurostar to Lille (£74 return), then the TGV to Arras (£24 return; voyages-sncf.com). Three-day festival tickets are a bargain £112 (mainsquarefestival.fr), but doubles at the Holiday Inn Express are already £501 for three nights (trivago.com), so go old-school and get a camping permit for £17.
The art of Umbria
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How does a week of gentle walks, art history and good wine in May grab you? Led by Dr Antonia Whitley, this tour follows the high-country footpaths from Citta di Castello to Assisi that were once used by St Francis and the itinerant art superstar Piero della Francesca, and takes in isolated hermitages, churches, cathedrals and hidden treasures painted not only by Piero, but by Luca Signorelli and Giotto. All this healthy exercise for body and mind is complemented by a satisfying series of long lunches, accommodation is in characterful four-star hotels and there’s never more than four miles of hiking a day. The trip departs on May 15 and costs £2,570, including most meals (020 8742 3355, martinrandall.com).
Get a book deal, Shropshire
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Arvon is an arts foundation set up in 1968 by the poets John Fairfax and John Moat, and the Hurst, a manor house set in 26 acres of Shropshire countryside, is its new author factory. Our pick of the dozens of courses on offer is Starting to Write Fiction: six days of workshops, tutorials and lectures on finding your voice, creating characters, writing dialogue and developing plot, as well as tricky stuff such as character arcs and underlying ethics. Your guides through the literary minefield are Toby Litt, the Costa-shortlisted Kerry Young and a former Arvon student, Jon Teckman. The course starts on August 7 and costs £760pp, full-board (020 7324 2554, arvon.org).
Palladio’s greatest hits, Italy
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About 450 years ago, Andrea Palladio’s Roman-inspired villas revolutionised western architecture, and he wrote the rulebook — all four volumes — for builders. This week-long tour of the Veneto region includes inspections of the architect’s public buildings in Vicenza — the Basilica and three palazzos, Thiene, Iseppo da Porto and Valmarana — and expert-led tours of a dozen or so villas, many of which are rarely open to groups. The highlight is probably the Villa Barbaro, in Maser, where Veronese did the decorating. The trip departs on May 25 and costs £2,270, B&B (01869 811167, ciceroni.co.uk).
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Opera in Munich and Bregenz
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Get a year’s worth of culture in a single performance-packed week with this trip to two of the biggest opera festivals in Europe, led by John Deathridge, a professor of music at King’s College London. The show starts in Munich on July 20, with morning lectures and evening performances of Rossini’s Semiramide, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Verdi’s The Force of Destiny. Then it’s off to Bregenz, on the shores of Lake Constance, which has a magnificent floating stage: an art installation in its own right. Its charmingly democratic opera festival crowds in sandwich-munching families beside champagne-sipping toffs, and you’ll be there for Bizet’s Carmen. Prices start at £2,935, half-board (0330 160 7471, aceculturaltours.co.uk).
Spiritual rewards on Iona
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The Venerable Douglas McKittrick, archdeacon of Chichester and leader of this spiritual retreat, believes Iona to be one of the “thin places” where the worldly and the divine seem much closer than elsewhere. St Columba came to this tiny island in the Inner Hebrides in the 6th century, and those in search of enlightenment have been visiting ever since. The three-night timetable is suitably ascetic: eat, pray and divide your time between silent solitude and quiet discussion. Hardly action-packed — but that’s the point. The retreat starts on June 26 and costs £495, B&B, including a night in Glasgow and travel from the city to Iona (0330 160 7467, livingthegospel.co.uk).
Soar with eagles in Mongolia
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TravelLocal finds brilliant local tour operators — which could never afford a presence in the UK — and acts as a go-between, giving you local expertise with financial protection. Tour Mongolia’s week-long trip to the country’s eagle festival is as immersive as it gets: staying in a Kazakh village, learning how to handle eagles, then trekking on horseback across the steppe to watch your adoptive birds on the wing at the festival. It departs on September 14 and costs £1,710, including all meals, but not flights (01865 242709, travellocal.com). Aeroflot has returns to Ulan Bator via Moscow from £560.
Revolutionary Russia: 100 years on
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In 1917, Lenin returned to Russia to orchestrate the October Revolution, which led to the creation of the world’s first communist state. And we all know how well that turned out. This nine-day commemorative tour follows Vladimir Ilyich’s footsteps from schooldays in Kazan to the Bolshevik HQ in St Petersburg and his mausoleum in Moscow. The trip departs on September 13 and costs £2,445, including most meals (0330 160 7470, regent-holidays.co.uk).
Carnival time, Cadiz
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Cadiz is Spain’s Liverpool, an irreverent, music-loving port where the sense of humour has been raised to the level of an art form. Carnival here means two weeks of high jinks, processions, concerts and street parties, accompanied by fireworks, señoritas and guitars. The daily highlight is the competition of the chirigotas — all-male choirs, frequently in drag, who perform satirical skits on squares across the old city. They’re eye-wateringly funny, even if you don’t speak a word of Spanish. The fun begins on February 23, and three nights at the four-star Hotel Playa Victoria cost £236pp (trivago.com). Fly to Jerez with Ryanair and take bus M-050 (£2).
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Chatsworth’s first flower show
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Dwarfing Chelsea’s and Hampton Court’s efforts (at least in terms of area), the Royal Horticultural Society’s inaugural show at Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, will take place in June over 28 acres. The overarching theme will be Design Revolutionaries, celebrating not just the genius of gardeners past, but the mad creativity of today’s masters of design. So no hanging baskets. Make a break of it with RHS Garden Holidays, which has a three-night itinerary from June 6 that also takes in the gardens at Felley Priory, Hardwick Hall, Haddon Hall and Harlow Carr. It costs £595, half-board (0330 160 7469, rhsgardenholidays.com).
Dance or strum in Andalusia
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Born in Cordoba, siblings Ana and Jose Dueñas Leon live flamenco and breathe flamenco, and if you cut them, they’d bleed flamenco. If you’ve always had a yearning to learn palmas, rumba, compas and rasgueos, try their annual workshop in an 18th-century manor house in the Alpujarras hills, which starts on September 16. There’s four hours’ tuition a day — book with Ana for dancing, Jose for guitar — tailored to all abilities. A week costs £635, including all meals, but not flights (01494 765775, cortijo-romero.co.uk). Fly to Malaga with Ryanair.
Romanian knees-up
££££ After years of cult status, the mainstream is increasingly embracing Balkan-inspired bands, from the “gypsy punks” Gogol Bordello to less familiar but more authentic acts such as Goran Bregovic and the hard-living Saban Bajramovic. Their thumping, drunken, anarchic beats have wowed fans of world music, and this eight-night trip to Romania is an in-depth celebration of the genre. You’ll visit Clejani, where the gypsy group Taraf de Haidouks started out, and Zece Prajini, home of Fanfare Ciocarlia. The poppier manele style gets better the more slivo you drink. The trip departs on May 27 and costs£1,500, excluding flights (020 7501 6741, songlinesmusictravel.com). Fly to Bucharest with Wizz Air.
The culture trend: art in Amsterdam
There are always good reasons to visit Amsterdam, with its calming canals, capacious galleries, impressive opera/ballet house and brilliant Concertgebouw orchestra, writes Helen Hawkins, editor of the Sunday Times Culture section. (Not to mention the chips with mayo.) This year, the Stedelijk Museum has added to them with three centenary exhibitions dedicated to the impact of De Stijl, the movement born in 1917 that promoted pure lines and primary colours: think Mondrian’s paintings. The first is on now, until May 21.
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Art galleries all over the Netherlands will be celebrating De Stijl, in fact, so you could consider side trips by train to the Hague, Breda or Eindhoven if the subject intrigues, though there’s enough fine art in Amsterdam alone to fill an unhurried weekend. The Rijksmuseum (like our National Gallery) is a key attraction — even more so since its revamp in 2013 and the opening of a modern-art wing in 2014 — and it’s stuffed with works by the great Dutch masters, including Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. A short stroll away is the mighty Van Gogh Museum, full of the unmatched works of one of the greatest of painters.
Over at the light-filled Dutch National Opera & Ballet, a glass castle surrounded by water, you can catch the best of the native companies: the contemporary dance group Nederlands Dans Theater, with its two troupes, NDT1 and NDT2; the Dutch National Ballet; and the Dutch National Opera. Look out (in May) for NDT1’s Parade, dedicated to the work of one of the hottest of choreographers, Crystal Pite.
In the opera programme, a standout is February’s Prince Igor, the Borodin epic we know mainly for its Polovtsian Dances. Directed by the Russian rising star Dmitri Tcherniakov, this is a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, where it was rave-reviewed.