All 140,000 tickets for this year's Glastonbury festival sold out within an hour and forty minutes, a musical version of Roald Dahl's much loved children's story Matilda opened on Broadway with a box office advance of £10m and the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, was a global success, with box office sales of more than £700m at home and abroad; on the face of it at least, the UK's arts sector is in rude health.

Amid a clamouring of ministers desperately making their final pitches before the axe falls in June's comprehensive spending review, culture secretary Maria Miller stressed the importance of the economic potential which the arts and culture offer to the UK economy.