Iraq War
Adam Sweeting
Inspector Muhsin al-Khafaji of the Iraqi police may be set to become one of those classically dog-eared, depressed and down-at-heel detectives who have proliferated in crime fiction. He could join a lineage that includes Martin Cruz Smith’s battered Russian sleuth Arkady Renko, or Bernie Gunther, anti-hero of Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy. Or he may create his own category of one.Like the aforementioned, Khafaji finds himself battling for survival against a hostile regime (or at least the chaotic and combustible remains of one, as the heavy-handed Americans impose themselves on a Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Early in the political drama Official Secrets, Keira Knightley’s real-life whistleblower Katharine Gun watches Tony Blair on television, giving his now infamous justification for the impending Iraq War, namely the existence of weapons of mass destruction. “He keeps repeating the lie,” she cries. “Just because you’re the Prime Minister doesn’t mean you get to make up your own facts.”There’s simply no escaping the resonance. The current occupant of No 10 isn’t the first to be economical with the truth; the real shock is that we keep on putting up with it. And the power of the film resides Read more ...
Owen Richards
In September 2014, after three months of captivity, Nadia Murad escaped ISIS control in Mosul, Iraq. Since then, she has dedicated her life to travelling the world and telling everyone who will listen about the plight suffered by her Yazidi people, then and now still. On Her Shoulders shows this exhausting commitment, simultaneously in the public eye yet seemingly ignored when action is required.As we’re introduced to Nadia, we quickly understand the strain this touring causes, constantly made to relive her horrifying experience for interviews. Her work is valuable for the public to Read more ...
Owen Richards
Major Fakhir is a deminer, responsible for disarming hundreds of mines around Mosul every week. His American counterparts know him by a different title: Crazy Fakhir, a man who rides the edge of his luck, constantly in imminent danger. Yet to him, death is nothing compared to the heavy conscience he would carry by doing nothing.The Deminer is an extraordinary insight into the life of Major Fakhir, compiled from around 50 hours of amateur footage. Armed with little more than a pair of wire cutters and a knife, Fakhir tackles a variety of bombs with worrying abandon: he hacks around landmines Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Jonathan Lewis
I was invalided out of the army in 1986. I’d been an army scholar through school and had a bursary at university. I went on to drama school then became an actor, and subsequently a writer and director. But I’ve always been passionately interested in how the military, and the people in it, are portrayed to the wider world.My first play Our Boys, about my experiences being invalided out of the military, was revived in the West End in 2012. One of my first big roles was as Sgt Chris McCleod for two series of ITV’s Soldier, Soldier. With awareness of PTSD being greater than ever, I thought it was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It was only at the dawn of the Blair age that Peter Kosminsky truly emerged as a basilisk-eyed observer of the nation’s moral health. By the time New Labour came to power in 1997, Kosminsky had been working for several years on a film which was eventually broadcast in 1999. Warriors, an award-winning account of the traumatic fallout of peacekeeping in Bosnia, served as a prequel to a trilogy of films in which he tracked the ethical degradation of the Blair decade.In The Project (2002) he dramatised the curdling of idealism occasioned by Millbank’s win-at-all-costs skullduggery. The Government Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was a coup by ITV to get Homeland writer Patrick Harbinson to pen this paranoid-conspiracy series, and rather droll to get Helen McCrory (wife of Homeland’s Damian Lewis) to play the lead. Yet even though the story of high-minded human rights lawyer Emma Banville had obvious potential in this era of terror plots and ubiquitous surveillance, the eventual solution was neither particularly surprising nor very satisfying.Throughout the series, McCrory had sunk herself into the role with steely-eyed determination and pursed lips, but it became increasingly hard to find her convincing as her Read more ...
Matt Wolf
"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned-Tory MP Rory Stewart's 2006 account of his attempt to bring order to a newly-liberated Iraq. Ambitious in scope but piecemeal in impact, the play gains immeasurably from Simon Godwin's fleet, pacy production, though you wonder if the whole enterprise might not work better on screen. In terms of content, Brown's adaptation furthers the Read more ...
Miriam Gillinson
Running Wild is a theatrical safari with no expenses spared. This latest stage adaptation of a novel by Michael Morpurgo (of War Horse fame) boasts a jungle-full of puppets – a majestic elephant and some affectionate orangutans included – and a tsunami that sweeps right over the audience. The puppets may steal your heart but the play itself, which peddles a stern conservation message, left me cold – and not just because it was a nippy night outdoors in Regent's Park. The story occupies classic Morpurgo territory and once again features a bereaved kid who finds solace and purpose in the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This was one of the most disturbing, terrifying and informative programmes imaginable, made more so by Dan Cruickshank’s calm demeanour as he interrogated everyone from scholars to fanatics about the actions and rationale of the Islamic State (IS) during the past two years in Iraq and Syria. These conversations were set against his own visits to the Middle East and terrifying videos of IS hammering to smithereens the contents of museums and bulldozing world-famous archaeological sites.When Cruickshank visited Iraq's ancient sites in 2002, he feared the destruction Western bombs might bring; Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Created by Gideon Raff, mastermind of Homeland and its Israeli forerunner Prisoners of War, and produced by Howard Gordon (who worked on Homeland and 24), Tyrant parades its roots on its sleeve. Its mix of action thriller and family drama, all souped up by a stiff dose of combustibly unstable Middle East politics, adds up to a slick entertainment formula, but do such deadly and complex issues deserve to be handled quite so glibly? If The Honourable Woman was a crossword without clues, this is more like a shopping list scrawled in felt pen.Nonetheless, the basic premise is reasonably promising Read more ...