New York City Ballet's spring season has been a serious disappointment. This is one of the world's major companies, visiting London for the first time since 1983. It should have been a big deal. The four programmes have been awkwardly chosen and often inadequately performed. These last two bills moved from NYCB's core choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, to more recent work. Quality plummeted.


There are different worries here. If Balanchine's own company no longer look good in his ballets, they're in trouble; with the third programme, the question is why they chose to tour such weak material.

For many young dancers following their dream, sustaining a career in dance is difficult enough. But to be at the helm of Scotland's national dance group, Scottish Ballet – and leading not the corps de ballet but the business transformation of the organisation – is still a dream come true for Sughrue.

Retiring from dance after an injury, the young American decided to follow the teaching route and won a scholarship to Sheffield University.

She finished a doctorate in dance – she is officially Dr Sughrue – and discovering an interest in arts and culture management, she found herself following her partner to Scotland in 1990 and has never left.

Now widely performed as an erotic masterpiece throughout the world, "Grosse Fuge" is often danced by a company's biggest and brawniest.

The men of the Sarasota company, however, tend more toward small and lean, which gives this production a more equal balance of power between the sexes.

Still, the ballet succeeds or fails on the basis of a strong male presence, and the Sarasota men do not disappoint.

The lives, loves and artistic output of the Bloomsbury group have generated a staggering amount of critical analysis and biography. Yet, even though almost every minor artist and servant in Bloomsbury has been subject to close attention, one name is outstanding for its neglect. Lydia Lopokova, the Russian ballerina who danced with Diaghilev and in 1925 became John Maynard Keynes's wife, has been treated by most historians of Bloomsbury as one of the group's more colourful but irrelevant satellites. Her dancing career has rarely been accorded more than a footnote, her presence in Bloomsbury represented by the occasional quirky anecdote. When I began researching Lopokova's life, I discovered just how odd an omission this has been. At the peak of her ballerina fame, she was far more famous and more written about than any other member of the group.