history
Gary Naylor
Like families, nations have secrets: dirty linen that they prefer not to expose to the light of day. Patriotic myths need to be protected, heroic narratives shaped, good guy reputations upheld. In 1942, the USA rounded up Japanese-Americans and locked them away in the badlands of the Midwest and promptly forgot about them – and then worked hard to keep it that way in the decades that followed. It’s likely you didn’t know that and it’s no accident if so.One such intern was George Takei – Star Trek’s Mr Sulu and, in his extraordinary second life, liberal activist supreme on social Read more ...
Gary Naylor
We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such indifference to the rise of fascism more widespread than feels comfortable to reflect upon, but so, too, was a sympathy extended to the Nazis in their psychotic mission to make Germany great again.It was against that complacent background that Lillian Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine, a seductive call to arms that knew its audience of New York’s Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“At the age of 40 a person begins to disperse and fade, darkening like a cloud,” says Elisabeth, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, played by a mesmerising Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s brilliant, fictionalised portrait of a woman whose main duties are to have her hair braided and stay thin, eating only orange slices for dinner. If her looks fade in this circumscribed royal world, what will be left of her?The action takes place over several months in 1877-8, in Vienna, Bavaria and England, as Elisabeth's 40th birthday comes and goes. Again and again Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Identity is thorny business. This was the parting thought of Anna X, the play that marked Emma Corrin’s West End debut in the summer of 2021. The same credo governs Corrin’s return to London theatre with Orlando, in Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel about a larger-than-life character hellbent on defying time, sex, and convention.Once again, Corrin blazes on stage – and across the centuries – with a central performance that is both lucid and layered. It’s a shame, then, that Michael Grandage’s breezy production doesn’t quite make the most of that great asset, not to Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Life is full of coincidences and contradictions. As I was walking to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was on his feet in the House of Commons delivering yet another rebalancing of individual and collective resources. On reading a couple of fine essays in the excellent programme, I saw the acknowledgement of the production’s sponsor, Pragnell.The first item that appears on the jeweller’s website is a pair of earrings retailing at an eye-watering £71,500. Which is to say that the inequalities that fired Charles Dickens’ anger in the 1840s are still with us in the Read more ...
India Lewis
Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog & Swamp sees the Pulitzer-winning novelist join a number of authors decrying the ecological devastation we’re wreaking on the planet. James Rebanks’ English Pastoral argued for radical agricultural rethink. Journalist Bronwyn Adcock chronicled Australia’s worst bushfire. And essayist and poet Rebecca Tamás reckoned with the ecological meanings of hospitality, pain and grief.Proulx, mainly known for writing fiction and guides to smallholdings, has become a champion of fens, bogs and swamps, the mulchy sinking places she loves and which are both a victim of and Read more ...
India Lewis
Tense with horror and the sticky darkness of the Argentinian night, Mariana Enriquez’s writing is rich and occult. Her epic novel, Our Share of Night, vividly translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, follows on from her short story collections Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. In this, her first novel to be translated into English, she delves further into a lushly violent and erotic world.Our Share of Night is set in the aftermath of the Argentine military junta’s worst excesses. The book begins in 1981 (the dictatorship ended in 1983) and the Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1814, Francis Jeffrey began his review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion with a provocative denunciation of romanticism: “This will never do,” he complained. “It bears no doubt the stamp of the author’s heart and fancy; but unfortunately not half so visibly as that of his peculiar system.”William Boyd’s latest excursion into fictional biography, aptly entitled The Romantic, is the fourth of the “whole-life” novels he has made his speciality, following The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and Sweet Caress (2015). It will almost certainly do, as far Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Richard III is a controversial figure, and will remain so after this film, which tells the remarkable story of how Philippa Langley, a woman with no background in academia, archaeology or as a historian, led the search to find the grave of the “usurper king”.It comes with a slew of accusations and counter accusations; some historians believe it wrongly absolves the king of any blame over the murders of his nephews, the young “Princes in the Tower”; Leicester University (whose archaeologists performed the successful dig) say they led the excavation, while Langley says she did but was sidelined Read more ...
David Kettle
"The poem is real," intones entertainer-turned-courtier Ellen solemnly as a prologue and epilogue to Rona Munro’s vivid, vibrant new James IV: Queen of the Fight, presented by Scottish producers Raw Material and Edinburgh’s Capital Theatres in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and getting its premiere at the city’s Festival Theatre before a Scotland-wide tour.It’s the follow-up – and latest in a projected series of no fewer than seven historical plays (the sixth, Mary, opens soon at London’s Hampstead Theatre) – to Munro’s James Plays trilogy unveiled at the Edinburgh Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The title of Andrew Murray’s new book poses a question that also vexed Friedrich Engels over 130 years ago. The German co-author of The Communist Manifesto despaired of English socialism, "that abomination of abominations", on the grounds that it had "not only become respectable but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses.”The treacherous lure of the Establishment has indeed been a constant problem for Labour leaders from Ramsay MacDonald and Hugh Gaitskell to Sir Keir Starmer. Roy Jenkins, who narrowly failed to get the top job, was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Three years later its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, became the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, while the BBC adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. Finally, after a long wait for her fans, came The Mirror & the Light, which followed its predecessors into the Read more ...