Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon
Profile Books, £25

It’s not until you get one-third of the way through this detailed biography that Catherine gets rid of her pathetic husband and is proclaimed empress and sovereign of all of Russia by the Imperial Guard. It had been a long journey from the moment when Sophie Friederike Auguste, as a 15-year-old princess from the small German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, arrived in St Petersburg to marry the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Peter, until she finally became the absolute ruler of Russia. And, in the end, it all happened so quickly.

Publish and Be Damned! The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror by Hugh Cudlipp
Revel Barker Publishing, £12.99

What with bloggers and tweeters and Wikipediasts, it seems anyone with access to the internet can be a journalist nowadays. So much so that those of us left in newspapers are scratching our headlines and wondering what to do to survive.

Inside the Revolution: A Journey Into The Heart Of Venezuela
Director: Pablo Navarrete

South America gets a raw deal in popular British media. It is largely ignored, so my knowledge of current events in Venezuela is a heck of a lot less than the trivia in my head about The X Factor, Strictly Come Dancing, Katie Price and Kerry Katona – and I do not consciously watch or follow any of them. I only know about these destroyers of Saturday night television and airbrushed, wretched creatures because the celebrity virus has seeped from the TV and started to liquefy my cerebral cortex much against my will. I seem to be powerless to stop the spread and I feel unclean, increasingly stupid and less aware of global current affairs. I crave intelligent viewing much as a drunk slavers over a kebab. So thank goodness the opportunity came to watch this interesting, straightforward, workmanlike but nonetheless effective documentary film by Pablo Navarrete. Inside The Revolution: A Journey Into The Heart Of Venezuela was an hour well spent.

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew
Allen Lane, £30

If you believe MI5 is staffed by red-necked crypto-fascists who push sharp splinters under the fingernails of the innocent when not arranging with the CIA, FBI and Mossad to destroy New York’s twin towers or blow up London’s Underground, then nothing in this review or this book is for you. You might as well spend your time with the little green men who’ve been in your garden shed for the past 30 years awaiting the return of Leon Trotsky.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Dinah Birch
Oxford University Press, £35

The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by the scholar and diplomat Sir Paul Harvey, was first published 77 years ago in November 1932. It was the first of the highly regarded Oxford Companions and has been enormously popular ever since; a staple not only of school and public libraries but of many homes up and down the country. It was the brainchild of Kenneth Sisam, best known for his book Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, who conceived it when he was working at the university press as a guide on the lines of the Reverend Ebenezer Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “to contain English authors, plots of their works, and characters; foreign authors commonly quoted; legendary characters; a little classical background; and allusions, such as the Wise Men of Gotham.”

The Informant!
Director: Steven Soderbergh

I’m Gonna Explode
Director: Gerardo Naranjo

Inspiration is in disappointingly short supply in The Informant! – a self-consciously larkish adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald’s book on Mark Whitacre, the biotech scientist who blew the whistle on the shady practices of his employer. As played by a podgy and much de-glamorised Matt Damon, Whitacre comes across as a neurotic, delusional Pooter of the modern corporate world. We’re privy to his interior monologue, which isn’t so much a stream of consciousness as a stream of conscience, as he negotiates some tricky ethical dilemmas with the eager help of the FBI.

Mixed Up North
Wilton’s Music Hall, London

This Much Is True
Theatre 503, London

This week, two examples of verbatim theatre. This form of theatre, which collects the words spoken by real individuals and puts them into the mouths of actors, has been a vital part of the rebirth of political theatre since September 11. But since these words are always edited, abbreviated or otherwise changed, there are very many different ways of creating verbatim drama.