More from Arts

I wonder how many people still listen to plays on radio now that there is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube and the hours taken up with Strictly Come Dancing. It’s not just that we’re being taken over by techie gadgetry so that there is less and less time to do anything else. (How many photos have you got trapped on your computer with no time to sort through their nameless numbers and download on to a memory stick, let alone buy the right paper to print them, etc., etc.?) It’s also very difficult to follow the action in a radio play and get involved in the drama if you’re tempted to text, flick on to Google or download those dratted photos midway through.

The East Anglians; Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, until 13 December Most exhibitions of photographs could be viewed just as satisfactorily from an armchair with a book of high-quality reproductions, but not The East Anglians. There are 58 colour photographs in this show, and they need to be seen in situ, partly because of their scale (some are very large), and partly because of their darkness, which would not transfer well to the printed page. The darkness is not helped by the slightly overweening black frames, which add a funereal air to the proceedings, but perhaps this is not inappropriate in a body of work that chronicles the decline of a way of life.

Henry Moore Textiles The Sheep Field Barn, Hoglands, Perry Green, Hertfordshire, until 18 October Hoglands, the former home of Henry Moore (1898–1986) near Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, was looking radiant on the late-summer day I visited it. The Foundation that Moore set up to care for his estate and reputation acquired the house from his family in 2004 and began restoring it. It gleams today probably more than it ever did when lived in, but a marvellous array of furniture and fittings, art and artefacts (including the original bottles of drink offered by HM to his visitors) ensures that the place still seems more of a home and less of a museum. The ground floor is open to the public and may be viewed under careful supervision.

A long drive mitigated by congenial and erudite company, through bosomy green hills under what felt like permanent soft mizzling rain, from one choice little festival on the Welsh borders, Presteigne, to another altogether more remote — Machynlleth, close to the coast, a tiny town (for all that a Welsh king once located his court there), where, in a converted nonconformist chapel, surprising and rewarding events take place. Not so the first I attended, a recital of poetry and song occasioned by the first world war, trudging through well-worn trenches and pastoral hankerings, the recitation shambling, the singing insensitive, the piano overweening. One left depressed by the subject, and without the compensation of catharsis.

Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions Museum Leuven, until 6 December Musée Hergé Louvain-la-Neuve When I was a child in Belgium, architecture was a dirty word — angry drivers would wind down their windows and yell, ‘Architecte!’ The insult dated back to the 19th century, when the megalomaniac architect Joseph Poelaert imposed the enormity of the Palais de Justice on Brussels, forcing large numbers of residents from their homes. Times change and memory fades; architects are back in favour in Belgium.