This week's talks, debates and live Q&As

Cornelia Parker
Manchester

Cornelia Parker’s art probes life’s epic questions with breath-taking spectacles. In her current career survey at the Whitworth, this includes her 1991 hit, Cold Dark Matter (An Exploded View), in which the debris from an exploded shed (charred wood, toys, boots, a copy of Proust) is suspended in the air, as if frozen mid-blast around a star-like lightbulb in a big bang analogy. Perhaps the biggest wow, though, was the opening night’s work: in a complicated series of manoeuvres she created - with Nobel prize-winning physicist Konstantin Novoselov - a meteor shower-cum-fireworks display that began with specks of graphite culled from drawings by William Blake, Constable and Picasso, as well as a letter by Ernest Rutherford. To mark both Parker’s exhibition and her appointment as honorary professor at the University of Manchester, the artist is giving a lecture that will provide insight into her working methods, including her collaborations with everyone from scientists to military pyrotechnicians. Expect Parker to leave no stone unturned, from the origins of the universe to the stuff of everyday life.

Whitworth Art Gallery, Thu

SS

Jesse Armstrong
London, Chipping Norton

Jesse Armstrong has been responsible for some of the most acerbic and influential screen comedy of the past decade, including Peep Show, The Thick Of It, Four Lions, Fresh Meat and ambitiously granular cop-shop satire Babylon. Somewhere in the midst of all that, he has found time to craft his recently published first novel. And any screenwriting peers with literary ambitions might allow themselves a Mark-from-Peep-Show flash of envious, internalised rage, as it’s really rather good. Set in 1994, Love, Sex And Other Foreign Policy Goals follows politically inflamed bricklayer Andrew, who travels from a Manchester building site to the chaos of the former Yugoslavia with a ragged, right-on theatre group as they tour a well-intentioned but hopelessly garbled message play. Prior to his solo appearance at ChipLitFest, Armstrong will be discussing his writing with fellow comic agitator Irvine Welsh as part of the Guardian’s Between The Lines series.

Bloomsbury Theatre, WC1, Tue; The Theatre, Chipping Norton, Fri

GV

Politicians Should Leave The Wealthy Alone
London

This debate, organised by the Spectator, has been made even more timely by Ed Miliband’s declaration that he would abolish the non-domicile rule, which allows some UK residents to avoid tax on income earned overseas - a move calculated to tap into a gathering resentment felt towards the rich. The question on the table here, essentially, is whether such resentment is justified. Speaking in favour of the motion – ie arguing that the rich contribute fairly – will be Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, associate editor Toby Young and Spear’s magazine founder and Ukip candidate William Cash (recently author of a transcendentally enraging philippic in the Telegraph on the deficiencies of modern domestic staff). Speaking against will be columnist Owen Jones, blogger Jack Monroe and Green MEP Molly Scott Cato. Andrew Neil chairs.

Milton Court, Guildhall School Of Music & Drama, EC2, Wed

AM