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It was summer 1981, and the towns and cities of Britain were alight. There had been riots in Brixton, south London, that April and on 10 July there were more — and not just in Brixton. Other parts of the city followed. And so did a long list of other places, from the unsurprising — Sheffield, Preston, Leicester — to the ones where the idea of a riot might have been expected to have disappeared with Captain Swing: Cirencester, Aldershot. ‘I was sitting in my flat watching the news, the riots happening all over the place,’ says Horace Panter, the bass player of the Specials. ‘And “Ghost Town” was No. 1.

If you like the BBC’s Les Misérables, you’ll love English National Ballet’s Manon. Manon, in Kenneth MacMillan’s telling, is The Glums in tights. Alina Cojocaru dances Manon, an 18th-century courtesan in Paris, pimped by her brother Lescaut (Jeffrey Cirio). She falls for Des Grieux (Joseph Caley), young, handsome, penniless, love’s young dream, and is later ensnared by the older, richer, crueller Monsieur GM. Cojocaru is sublime. ‘That’s her!’ whispered my neighbour in the stalls as Manon fluttered through the crowd at the inn. With Des Grieux, Cojocaru is sweet and expressive, tender and teasing. As Monsieur’s mistress, in diamonds and furs, she dances with quiet power and cold command.

The Royal Ballet’s Les Patineurs is January as you would wish it. No slush, no new-year sales, no streaming chest colds. Winter, as imagined by Frederick Ashton, is an eternal ice rink lit by Chinese lanterns hung from icing-sugar branches. Ashton’s choreography is ingenious. His dancers really do seem to glide, the boards of the stage to freeze. You believe completely that they are on skates, not slippers. The men wear sheepskin jackets, the women bonnets and polka-dot tulle. Sleigh bells ring and fresh flakes fall. The ensemble slip, slide and dance a skating conga. Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell are a Torvill-and-Dean dream in the pas de deux. Kaneko is light, flowing, sweetly flustered as her partner tips her upside-down.

Not a bad year for the award. Honourable mentions must go to the landfill abstractions of Oxford’s new Westgate Centre, to the bees that have appeared in Manchester’s streets to promote the ‘unique buzz’ of the city and to Gillian Wearing, a once decent conceptual artist who has taken to sculpture like a cat to water with her statue of Millicent Fawcett. Nothing, however, brought more mush to our towns than the first world war commemorations. As Simon Jenkins wrote in these pages, ‘reaching for a grand sweeping gesture, something “profound”, is too tempting’ in commissions about war. ‘The search for wishy-washy universals soaks up all the energy and bromides usually result.

The Royal Ballet is a company in search of a prince. It has no lack of dancing princesses. You could search the kingdom and find no lovelier dancers than Marianela Nunez, Lauren Cuthbertson, Francesca Hayward, Natalia Osipova, Akane Takada, Sarah Lamb, Laura Morera and Yasmine Naghdi. But a true prince is as rare as a golden egg. Since Sergei Polunin went so energetically awol in 2012, the Royal Ballet has lacked a male principal with all four virtues of the leading man: classic handsome looks, height, faultless technique and some gift as an actor. Polunin had it all. He was dishy, dashing and dangerous. He had a fifth quality, too: seductive, flaring charisma. The company was less without him, and he lost without them.

So there I was in Soho Square on a cold and rainy morning, nibbling my complimentary almond croissant and eagerly looking forward to the advance preview of Mike Leigh’s new historical epic Peterloo. This People’s Uprising of 1819, and its brutal suppression by a wealthy, uncaring and out-of-touch metropolitan elite, took place precisely 200 years before we finally leave the EU next year. And thrilling if traumatic times they were too. ‘An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King… A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field…’ wrote Shelley in some of his most ferocious lines.

In Britain today, Islam in its original essence is not to be found in mosques or Muslim schools, but on the first floor of the British Museum. There, the Albukhary Islamic gallery, newly opened to the public, dazzles visitors and defies every certainty promoted by today’s hardline Muslim activists. This spectacular exhibition of objects from across continents and centuries shows us a history of continuity of civilisations, coexistence of communities. It offers a compelling corrective to current popular notions of Islam as an idea and a civilisation. Too often, we assume that Islam’s arrival on the world stage involved some violent break with the past that brought forth a new Muslim civilisation.

Like it or not, provincial ballet audiences love a story they can hum and any director planning to tour a swan-light, sugar plum-free menu has always done so at their peril. Tchaikovsky isn’t compulsory: a really well-known story, however undanceable, can usually do decent business (Northern Ballet’s extremely silly Three Musketeers is a reliable granny-magnet). But less familiar titles can be box-office poison — as English National Ballet is forever discovering. When the former Royal Ballet star Tamara Rojo took over in 2012, she immediately set about breaking down the vanilla tastes of ENB’s regional fanbase with a lavish new production of Le Corsaire.

William Forsythe has been called a lot of things in his four decades as a dancemaker: wilful provocateur, ‘pretentious as hell’, even ballet’s Antichrist. But nothing, he claims, to warrant US government officials showing up, unannounced, at his door and threatening him with arrest. Had he been reported by an angry dance purist, perhaps? After all, this is the choreographer who has done more than any other to push the limits of what ballet can be, the great forward-thinker hailed for his athletic, sometimes bewildering, deconstructions of an art form that goes back centuries. It’s gained him an army of devoted (read obsessive) fans, but also some vocal detractors.