Simon Callow is a complete Cnut, rave critics

Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst's joint venture into the restaurant business goes from strength to strength according to the Scarborough Evening News. Tracy and Damien's Plaice on Filey Road has been awarded the coveted Best Chip Shop award for 2005, beating long-time champions Mother Hubbard's into second place. The panel felt that, although Mother Hubbard's had the edge on price, Tracy and Damien's Plaice offered enough interesting alternatives to the traditional chippie meal to scoop the prize. The most popular dish on the menu, dogfish sliced in two and suspended in a tank of malt vinegar for six months with chips, mushy peas, pot of tea and two slice, costs only £5.75, with a £1.25 supplement if you want to eat it in a burning tent.

Phillip Glass brings his latest work to London next week in a performance by the artist for whom it was specially written, Celine Dion. The ninety minute piece for voice, string orchestra and electronics is based on a fragment of the theme from Titanic and is called My Heart Will Go On and On and On and On and On and On. Like their previous collaboration, Shouting Music, the vocal line is pitched just outside the singer's natural range, and is said to be an exploration of the capacity of an audience in the shared performance space to engage with sounds which fall beyond the boundaries of melody and interest.

Paul Muldoon, until recently Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, has cranked up his beef with Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney another notch. Regular readers will recall how Muldoon dropped a joint last year in which he dissed Heaney's overriding preoccupation with the natural world and pointed out that Heaney's ride (a 1998 Volvo) was inadequate. Heaney's response, a broodingly threatening villanelle, compared Muldoon's wordplay to the farting of hares in a thicket of hazel and suggested that Muldoon's ho' was in fact a man. Now Muldoon has hit back during a reading at the Hay-on-Wye Festival with a pastiche of Heaney's own poetry entitled The Pencildick Sonnets. Lines such as "Yielding bullethole to the batty throb, tight spurt of essence: tadpole in the swamp" seem certain to provoke Famous Seamus further. Watch this space.

Simon Callow has taken the New York theatre world by storm with his role in The Rising Tide, a new play by Steph Newton about the early Danish king Cnut, famed for his attempt to hold back the sea. Normally vituperative critics have been raving about Callow's rounded performance — "Callow is a complete Cnut," drooled Marcie Feinberg of the Village Voice. The final scene, in which the king's attempt to restrain the waves ends in failure, has provoked the greatest response from critics and public alike. "Enormously powerful. The sight of Callow's dripping Cnut will stay with me for some time to come," wrote normally cool critic Julian Barnes. The production will travel in the autumn to Denmark where the entertainment industry has always maintained a lively interest in Cnut.

Ross Kemp, never one to shy away from a challenge, has taken a role in a piece of experimental eco-theatre which is being improvised by the Rainbow Forest Theatre Collective in Telford. Speaking to The Stage Kemp said: "I feel very strongly that we still need to keep environmental issues like illegal logging at the top of the agenda." Director of the company Cass Dearing said that it was "fantastic" to have Ross on board, particularly as the role seemed to be so well suited to his talents. Kemp will play a piece of mahogany.

Jo Wark, surprise winner of last year's Man Booker Prize with the poignant "A Small Fragile Thing", has followed the trend for increasingly confessional writing with her follow-up book, a searing memoir of her mother's illness and decline entitled "Fuc*k Off And Die, You Sag-Tit Old Witch". In it she deals frankly and honestly with the trials of looking after an elderly relative when you have book signings and dinners to go to. Most controversially, she describes her relief and joy when Mrs Wark the elder finally croaks. A similar sense of shock greeted Ian McEwan's "Actually, It's Not Fiction" in which he confesses that he really did bury his mum in the garden, shag his sister, rape and drown a small child, cut a bloke's throat from ear to ear and saw a man into small bits and put him in a suitcase. The trend seem set to continue with the publication next month of Martin Amis's "I'm a Wanker" in which he recounts his life-long love affair with the hole in his hand.

Previously

• Academia rocked by Shakespeare revelation
• Channel 4 in rotting corpse rumpus
• Mel Gibson to shoot Finnegan's Wake in Hittite