The Power of Yes
National Theatre, London
Playwright David Hare is one of the giants of contemporary British theatre. His skill is to be the Balzacian social secretary who records the mood of the day – what used to be called the spirit of the times. Now, with The Power of Yes, he turns his eye on the current financial crisis and asks all the right questions: how did it happen and who was to blame?
Generation Kill
Channel 4
True Blood
Channel 4
As a patriotic tube-lover, I find few things more galling than fellow viewers who boast they “only watch US imports” because American televison is streets ahead of our home-grown output. While this is patently absurd (at its best, British TV is superb and is sold around the world), you can sometimes see what they mean. Just now, for example, the BBC is pumping out safe and pointless costume revival Emma, while Channel 4 has imported two new hard-edged drama series from that hit factory in the United States, HBO.
The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus
Director: Terry Gilliam
Pontypool
Director: Bruce McDonald
Considering the dramas that bedevilled its production off-set – the sudden death of leading man Heath Ledger – Terry Gilliam’s typically overstuffed fantasy-extravaganza The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, while far from the director’s best work, is also by no means the disaster many had predicted.
Turner and the Masters
Tate Gallery, London
Artists have long borrowed from other artists – a theme clearly explored in Picasso: Challenging the Past at the National Gallery earlier this year. Part of an artist’s training was traditionally seen as copying the work of renowned and respected painters of the past. In this sense, the exhibition Turner and the Masters, comes as no surprise. Yet few artists looked so assiduously, thoroughly and with such consummate skill at the work of earlier artists as JMW Turner.
Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25
The 1989 revolution lays claim to be the world’s greatest revolution precisely because it was peaceful. Perhaps it would command more attention if blood had been shed as in all previous revolutions – think the English Civil War, the Terror and the guillotines of France after 1789, the deaths in America between 1776 and 1865 when American politics finally turned away from violence, or the ghastly revolutions of the 20th century from the Bolsheviks in 1917 to the Ayatollahs in Iran in 1979. But Victor Sebestyen’s book is worth a dozen rehashes of World War II by Andrew Roberts and his clones.
The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts
Allen Lane, £25
In his new history of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts focuses on Hitler’s key blunders, suhc as ordering his Panzers to halt outside Dunkirk on May 24 1940, switching from bombing Britain’s airfields to bombing our cities on September 7 that year, attacking the Soviet Union without having first defeated Britain, and failing to get Japan to assist in his attack on Russia.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson
MacLehose Press, £18.99
How times change. When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first novel by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish journalist who, before his untimely death in 2004, worked tirelessly and fearlessly in the fight against fascism in northern Europe, was published in Britain in January last year it was regarded as something of a curiosity. Reviews were generally kind – on these pages I wrote: “Even if you’re not normally a fan of thrillers, I urge you to read this book because it’s an intelligent contemporary novel as well as a rattling good read” – but thin on the ground. Probably because interest in detective fiction in translation, with the exception of Maigret, has never been big in Britain.
A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy by Martin Bell
Icon Books, £11.99
I am often asked: “After 43 years of continuous membership, surely you miss being an MP?” No, I don’t miss the House of Commons, as it has now become. I am pretty sure that I would have missed the Commons had it remained as it once was, and as it was for three decades after I was elected in 1962.
According to the Daily Telegraph: “The Liberal Democrats tutored their MPs in how to systematically exploit their taxpayer-funded expenses.” Is it a good thing or a bad thing that they were incapable of working out how to fiddle the system for themselves?
The Chagossians are continuing their fight after being cheated of their birthright. Glyn Ford and Richard Gifford report