We bring you our guide to living well in the world’s capitals, from exhibitions to cinema, food, drink, fashion, music and beyond. Just call it culture and take it, it’s yours.

LONDON, SATURDAY 5TH OCTOBER – SUNDAY 6TH OCTOBER 2013

ART UNDER ATTACK; smashed up, defaced, beheaded, torn up
It seems last year’s attack on Rothko’s Black On Maroon at Tate modern may have inadvertently inspired its longer standing sister Tate Britain’s major autumn exhibition. Art Under Attack looks at the history of physical assaults on art in Britain from the Reformation to the present day.

Divided into three sections, the show looks at the deliberate destruction of icons, symbols and monuments for religious, political and aesthetic reasons. The show features a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, which was hung upside down in the nineteenth century (and remains so to this day) by Prince Frederick Duleep Singh, works targeted by the Suffragettes, including Edward Burne-Jones’s Sibylla Delphica (1898) and Allen Jones’s woman-as-furniture Chair (1969), which was infamously damaged on International Women’s Day during the 1980s. Plus expect to see the work of artists known for having used destruction as a creative force – such as Gustav Metzger, John Latham and Yoko Ono. Whatever you do, leave your Sharpie at home.

Hardened gallery goers never go out on an empty stomach. Drop by Borough Market for a killer breakfast sarnie as you catch the ferry from the South Bank along to Tate Britain.

Tate Britain: Art Under Attack, until Sunday 5th January 2014
Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

FRIED EGGS are in galleries as well as cafés
The critics’ favourite YBA Sarah Lucas has been given a long overdue exhibition of her anthropomorphic sculptures at The Whitechapel supported by Louis Vuitton.

This exhibition takes us from Lucas’s 90s trips into the perversities of British tabloid journalism to current works with the additional twist of a tailor-made new piece commissioned by the gallery (to give you a little prelude, the last piece she made for them was called Tits in Space).

Sarah’s impressively humorous take on things all too human, promises to be an art-season highlight; embracing penises, breasts or exposed innards compose what will be the London premiere of her light reflecting bronzes. Think of it as “a dazzling celebration of polymorphous sexuality.” Or see for yourself and call it an extraordinary look into what a British art icon can do with with everyday materials. Time well spent on a Saturday afternoon.

Whitechapel Gallery: Sarah Lucas, until Sunday 15th December
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX

FILTH, everywhere
There’s brutally realistic cinema and then there’s in your face, pushed down your throat, force fed, kicked to the pavement-type cinema. This punky adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel Filth is exactly that, bordering on a visual glossary of grimness and urban depravity. Thankfully, to stop viewers from throwing themselves from multistories, it also dishes up humour that’s as darkly hilarious as any of Welsh’s prose. Be captivated by James McAvoy’s sociopathic journey, quoted by Welsh himself as “a twisted romance about someone who has lost love and is desperately looking for it back.”

If Trainspotting was anything to go by, this’ll be another deeply involved and equally brilliant crime-comedy-drama.

Filth is at cinemas now, check listings for details.

GET A GLAMOUR INJECTION with the masses on ‘The Strip’
We’ve been hearing for some time that Pablo Flack and David Waddington, the gents behind two of our favourite East End feeding troughs, Bistrotheque and Shrimpy’s, were planning something big in partnership with Shoreditch’s newly opened Ace Hotel. Well, it’s true – the pair have opened the doors to new venture Hoi Polloi, a modern brasserie located just through Hattie Fox’s Flower Shop. And despite the ferocious clicking of fancy shoes clambering for one of their 100 tables this weekend, you’ll always have a good chance of grabbing something to eat as the same menu will be offered at the bar which seats 50.

The cocktail list has a touch of the tongue twister about it – anyone for a Meshigener Palone or Meese Shyker?   No? Then go sip Naff Clobber or a National Handbag (thankfully a mix of Brockmans gin, pink ginger, white grapefruit, nothing to do with old tights and tissues).

Hoi Polloi, 100 Shoreditch High St, London E1 6JQ