The Vivaldi was given complete but interspersed with much additional music, both composed and improvised. Kennedy swaps from violin to electric throughout the evening and he is really on form here. His playing is amazing, of course, totally committed physical playing so extraordinary that it is both eccentric and wonderful. He can and does make a beautiful singing tone in the slow movements, still one of the great fiddlers. The violin is his extra limb and while many players speak through their instruments, Kennedy thinks through his.

The oft-quoted aim of the period instrument revival was to “remove the layers of varnish to reveal the authentic beauty beneath” and though this was by no stretch of the imagination an “authentic” performance it shared many of the qualities of the most exciting period performers. The electric guitar replaced the chitarrone and the vocal quartet essentially provided organ continuo. The violin trio of warbling birds in “Spring” was joined by bird whistles and why not? Antonio would have loved it. This is after all the most picturesque of music.

Singers sometimes intoned quiet poetry over the playing, echoing perhaps Vivaldi’s own descriptive doggerel. Everything was imaginative and creative from the barking dog viola solo to the repeated up-bows and playing on the bridge of “Winter”; it was great to see Nigel avoiding the too obvious stamping of the feet (written in the score) here.

The jazz inspired prelude to “Autumn”, with fantastic trumpet work, was perhaps a little too indulgent but the astonishing speed of the first movement propelled us along. Undoubtedly a master of the effects pedals, Kennedy sometimes used that which plays his fingered line an octave lower and there were some small tuning issues, but overall the effect was of a great baroque organ. Sometimes so unpredictable it’s obvious even the players don’t know what he’s going to do next, the foray into Fritz Kreisler became a little uncomfortable.

The second half was less compelling. Time allowed only three of the projected Four Elements – “Air”, “Earth” and “Water”. Beginning beautifully like “The Lark ­Ascending” these pieces had much colour in various, mostly jazz-inspired styles, at the emotional centre an utterly astonishing improvised cadenza from Kennedy.

His mostly middle-aged audience has grown with him and forgives a little on-stage swearing and drinking. As do I.

Set in Russian-occupied Eastern Poland, Nicholas Wright’s new drama, Travelling Light, evokes the early years of film-making. Using the form of a memory play, Wright introduces us to Maurice Montgomery, a Hollywood director, who looks back from the 1930s to his youth in a pre-war shtetl, a place where the clash of different cultures – Jewish, Polish and Russian – created a melting pot of ­creativity.

The young Motl Mendl, as he was ­originally named, returns to his village after the death of his father, the local photographer, and discovers a Lumière Brothers ­cinematograph, which he soon uses to film his neighbours.

Financed by Jacob, a timber-merchant, Motl is inspired by Anna, a gentile servant, and together in some of the evening’s most enthralling scenes they discover the possibilities of close-up, montage and editing. But filming friends and neighbours doesn’t get you very far, and soon they embark on a fictional story.

Of course, in real life, movies were not discovered by one person in one place, but evolved in several different locations through the creative meeting of

new ­technological possibilities and the ­demands of the mass market. But this parable of artistic vision and the dawning imagination is at first enormously suggestive, and nicely mixes humour with illustrative film projections.

In the second half, Motl turns out to be much less illustrious that we might have at first believed. Wright creates an imaginative ending to his play that artfully ties up the loose ends in the manner of a master ­storyteller.

It’s not very plausible, but it is ­enjoyable. The charm of the play is that is stimulates and entertains, but without stretching the audience. Like its title, it travels lightly across the terrain from Western Europe to America.

Watching the birth of a new art form like this feels a bit miraculous and, in common with plays such as Terry Johnson’s Hitchcock Blonde, the account given here suggests that modern movies from the ­beginning necessitated a compromise ­between artistic integrity and populism. And knowing mirth is derived from showing how money problems and interfering producers were there from the start.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, Travelling Light stars Antony Sher as Jacob, Damien Molony as Motl and Lauren O’Neil as Anna. If there is a tendency for Sher to hover on the brink of Fiddler on the Roof cliché, this is partly because that ­musical and the art of Marc Chagall have so successfully imprinted their vision of shtetl life onto our imaginations that it is difficult to eradicate them. But if the production sometimes feels a bit ­inauthentic in its portrayal of Jewish life, it remains a good account of how the ­preoccupations of some Eastern Europeans stamped their mark onto the Hollywood dream machine.

By contrast, Nancy Harris’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1889 novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, does feel authentic as it sends us into the depths of Russia, as Pozdynyshev, a middle-aged man, rides the trains ­endlessly, telling anyone who will listen the story of his lustful youth, his marriage to a beautiful young innocent and then his murder of her, inspired by his jealousy of her relationship with a music teacher. ­Acquitted by the courts for this crime of passion, he remains trapped inside his memories and his sexual guilt.

Although Tolstoy’s main message – that chastity is much better than carnal passions – gets lost somewhere along the line, this monologue is a riveting piece of theatre. Pozdynyshev, played by the craggy and ­intense Hilton McRae, buttonholes the ­audience from the start and holds us with all the manic insistence of a man ­possessed. Slowly, this ex-government official tells the terrible tale of how a nice middle-class ­marriage turned into violence and death.

Natalie Abrahami’s production, which was first seen at this venue in 2009, is staged on a set that is a partially distressed railway carriage, with a transparent screen for the background. This enables her to show, by lighting up the hidden space behind the screen, the scenes between the wife (Sophie Scott) and the violinist music teacher (Tobias Beer) as they play Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata. Seeing and hearing the music played live definitely intensifies the story.

Not only does the play show their interaction, which evokes ideas about the erotic nature of music, but it also shows Pozdynyshev’s jealous imaginings. Although Tolstoy’s novella was banned by the Tsarist censors for its frank picture of sexuality, what comes across now is its ­portrait of a man consumed by his own fantasies. There is something very Russian in the openness of the text, its lack of hypocrisy and its blatant confusion. Like many troubled men, Pozdynyshev expresses both his love and his hatred for women, often within a single sentence.

The vividness of Tolstoy’s view of women reads like an argument in favour of feminism. He see them as natural sexual predators, who grossly manipulate and tempt men to forget the higher things in life. At the same time, he criticises bourgeois marriage as licensed prostitution, which was a common stance among freethinkers in the late 19th century.  And the success of this production can be seen in the compelling way in which these ideas are squeezed through the diseased imaginings of their unreliable narrator.

But that doesn’t matter because the magic of the myths and the mysteries is more powerful than the dull, prosaic truth – and that is why the legend of Arthur has echoed down the years. As Armitage says, he lives on in the collective imagination, “not just in literature but as a star of screen and stage and in many forms of popular culture and high art. No matter how many times he receives his death blow and is carried to Glastonbury or ferried to Avalon, Arthur remounts and rides again as the once and future king”.

Tales of Arthur seem to date from the period, after 410, when the Roman legions left Britain (what they called Britannia was, roughly, what we know as England and Wales) and the country was attacked by Teutonic tribes from north-west Europe. He appears, first, in Welsh poems such as Y Gododdin, and some attributed to ­Taliesin, as a Celtic hero defending the people of the west from their enemies –

the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Frisians and Jutes. ­Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about Arthur in his History of the Kings of Britain in 1136 when, as Armitage dryly points out, “literature and history were not ­necessarily approached as independent ­disciplines”.

Wace introduced the Round Table in his Roman de Brut (1155), La?amon the magical aspects of Morgan le Fay in Brut (c1190) and Chrétien de Troyes the ideals of courtly love, the chivalric code and the pursuit of the Holy Grail in his Arthurian Romances. Sir Thomas Malory, in Le Morte Darthur, printed by William Caxton in 1485, drew on his predecessors to imaginatively retell the stories in prose in a form we can recognise today – they were known to Tennyson when he wrote his Arthurian cycle Idylls of the King between 1855 and 1874 – and Armitage says ­“Malory had ­certainly read the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the academic and ­unglamorous title” given to a Medieval epic poem of 4,346 lines, of which this is a new translation.

Armitage has a bit of form here. Five years ago, he published a glorious translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century poem of 2,530 lines about courage, loyalty, temptation and chivalry. While not as faithful as other translations – JRR Tolkien’s (1953) is a better student crib – Armitage managed to retain the four-stress rhythmic line and alliteration of the Middle English original while peppering the poetry with modern idioms. It is, as I said in these pages at the time, amagnificent achievement; a powerful and exciting new version of one of the jewels of Medieval English literature.

This poem was written some time around 1400, we don’t know the name of the author, and there is only one manuscript copy – in the library of Lincoln Cathedral – in existence. “Typically”, says Armitage, “each line of the original has four stresses, two falling either side of a caesura, and contains three alliterating syllables, usually two on the left side of the divide then one on the right, followed by an unalliterating stressed syllable”.

Technically, Armitage is right on the money, writing of “all the red gold and the riches of Rome” and telling how “our brave, bold king had entered the battlefield / with battalions in formation and banners unfurled.” It’s brutal, bloody stuff – “fetched him a blow of such force in the forehead / that the burnished blade bit through to his brain” and “through the bladder and bowels he drove that blow, / piercing his privates, ripping them apart” – but beautifully written, like this line of Cador’s as he sees the King of Libya die at his feet: “Find comfort if you can as you cool in the clay.”

There are some wonderful set pieces – the dream of a dragon which brings ­Beowulf to mind, the death of Kay, and Arthur’s hand to hand combat with the monster of Mont St Michel – but it is the way that Armitage manages to sustain the energy of his version for 156 pages – “till the fame that we fought for has frittered away” – that is most impressive. His translation is a revelation which has rescued a Medieval epic from obscurity.

He had, says Harry Kelsey, a “stolid ­composure” – but this was an advantage in getting things done.

One success was introducing legislation for a return to Roman Catholicism. A stumbling block existed between the Vatican and the new owners of church lands confiscated during the dissolution of the monasteries. Philip used his influence to persuade Rome to drop its claims. His marriage to Mary was strategic; he was pressured into it by his father, Charles V, driven by a desire to form an alliance against France. Ever the dutiful son, Philip was also a dutiful husband – and did not take mistresses, at least while in England.

One awkward issue left unresolved was his official position. In the marriage treaty, he could enjoy the “kingly name” and was allowed to partake in government, but this would end if the queen predeceased him. Philip wanted a coronation but Parliament dragged its heels fearing that, if crowned, his heirs (by Mary or anyone else) would turn England into a Hapsburg satellite. Was this fear justified? Was Philip trying to re-negotiate the treaty? Did the absence of a crown fatally undermine his status? And did he always agree with his wife?

Kelsey says Mary was prepared to “allow the new religion to continue in areas where the people preferred it”, but she executed far more Protestants than her predecessor Edward VI killed Catholics. Historians argue over the exact number – were the leaders of the Wyatt rebellion killed for being Protestants or for being traitors? – but 300 is the accepted figure. Kelsey, erring on the conservative side, ­argues it was “perhaps 200 in all”.

What was Philip’s view? We know he approved of the execution of a man who ­attempted to murder a monk – standard for the time – but what of the execution

of the Archbishop of Canterbury,

Thomas ­Cranmer, architect of the English Reformation? Did Philip support ­Cranmer’s death? Or express caution? Was he consulted and, if not, why not? The ­decision to burn Cranmer at the stake was pivotal in Bloody Mary being perceived – and not just by Protestants – as vengeful, yet this book ignores it.

Calais was another debacle. Kelsey lays the responsibility entirely at the doors of the Privy Council, whose members were not prepared to pay for its defence. Were they too tightfisted? Or did they think it not worth defending?

The last chapter is a diatribe against Elizabeth, a “shameless flirt, frolicking in bed with her guardian, Thomas Seymour” – a highly contentious claim. Kelsey even suggests Elizabeth may have been a man with deformed genitalia – “the evidence is contradictory”. Possible, I suppose, but highly unlikely. There are more obvious reasons for her rejection of Philip’s ­marriage proposal. Finally, Kelsey claims that in refusing the King of Spain’s “great gift”, Elizabeth began “a global conflict ­between England and Spain that lasted for the next four centuries and may not yet be ended”. Now, even Philip might have found that funny.

Baruch Rachmilevitch – Bert Ramelson’s original name – was born in the Ukrainian shtetl (Jewish community) of Cherkassy just across the river from Kiev. He was seven when Lenin launched the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, aiming to change the world. No matter that his father was a Talmudist scholar qualified to be a rabbi and wishing to escape communism’s rejection of religious doctrine; young Baruch was destined to be a Leninist revolutionary. Had he remained in Cherkassy – as his three older revolutionary sisters did – instead of emigrating to Canada in 1922, it is a fair bet that Comrade Rachmilevitch would have graduated to sit alongside Stalin or maybe Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and the other discarded Bolshevik pioneers as part of the Soviet Union.

Instead he became a leading British communist who only in his later days developed doubts about Lenin’s doctrine of “democratic centralism” – the corepiece of Soviet communism. Between those dramatic beginnings and his death in 1994, Ramelson rose to become one of the most influential figures in the Communist Party in Britain. The irony was that this revolutionary, who played a key role in developing the party, was a controversial figure in its collapse in 1991.

Ramelson became the party’s national industrial organiser in 1965. From a modest office in King Street, just off the Strand in London, he masterminded an industrial strategy through a disciplined network of communist trade unionists across the movement. In that role, to 1977, he sometimes seemed to exercise more influence on Britain’s industrial system than the governments of Harold Wilson and Ted  Heath. It was a critical time for politics, especially on the left, and by 1974 one in 10 full-time union officials were members of the CP – largely due to Ramelson’s exceptional organising ability and his dedication to creating an industrial force capable of determining, or changing, government economic policy, Labour and Conservative. Communists in Britain had an influence in industry quite out of proportion to the party’s membership and despite their failures in parliamentary elections. Much of this was due to the boy from Cherkassy.

He had come a long way since moving with his parents to Canada where he studied law. By his early 20s, he was working at a law firm but, influenced by Zionism as well as Marxism, he joined a kibbutz in Palestine where he could combine Marx with a Jewish experiment in collective living. It was there he learned how to use firearms. His attachment to Zionism was brief and he went home planning to join the Communist Party, then illegal in Canada. Instead he went to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists as part of the International Brigades. He joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and, in 1938, formally became a member of the Canadian Communist Party (in Spain). He fought on various fronts, was wounded and went to England in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War to join the British Army, train as a tank driver and was sent to North Africa. In the Battle for Tobruk in 1941 he was ­captured and spent six months in a desert prisoner of war camp from where he was shipped to Italy.

After the war, he got a job as a salesman at Marks & Spencer in Yorkshire which, from 1946, became his political base. It was there, as a member of the shop workers’ union USDAW, that he teamed up with local communists, married his first wife Marion, who was also actively involved in party affairs, and became Yorkshire district secretary of the CP.

But it was as national industrial organiser that he became really influential. He was, in effect, the strategic commander of the ­Communist Party in its ideological battle against the capitalist state, using communist strength in the unions. Ramelson was an ­archetypal revolutionary in the Leninist mould until he was removed from the post in 1977. That was a turning point for him – and for the Communist Party in Britain which was riven with ideological and personality disputes. Orthodox communism was in decline across Europe, with the Soviet Union badly damaged by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which Ramelson opposed in defiance not only of Moscow but of those British comrades known as “tankies” for supporting the suppression of Alexander Dubcek and “socialism with a human face”.

In the end, Ramelson failed for a range of reasons. By the time he departed from his role, two years before Margaret Thatcher was elected, the Communist movement, in Britain and Europe, was split between reformists and remaining revolutionaries, and Ramelson’s uncompromising views on wages policy, Harold Wilson’s Government’s Social Contract, and any creative collaboration with the state, even under Labour, were collapsing under the weight of immense practical difficulties.

A more liberal model of Euro ­communism, in the mould of Antonio Gramsci, was fashionable, even among British communists. Ramelson, on the ­editorial board of the World Marxist Review, based in Prague, was under attack from old comrades, partly for his policies but also for his style. Serious rifts opened within the party hierarchy and between them and their daily newspaper, the Morning Star, while the party’s theoretical journal, Marxism Today, had a makeover and, with its new-found ­passion for Gramsci, made a remarkable ­impact on the intellectual left.

Ramelson was stunned by these ­developments and, with his influence dissipated, he later spoke of his disillusionment with the way Soviet communism developed under Stalin; his favourite sister, Rosa, was a victim of the Gulag. This book struggles effectively to analyse these upheavals, but concludes that Ramelson’s final years helped reinforce his “growing conviction that democratic centralism was a system prone to corrupt misuse by party leaderships anxious to stifle debate and repress opposition”.

He left a parting conviction that some form of socialism would eventually triumph – yet no belief that his own strategy might be part of that process.

His latest collaboration with Dujardin, however, has propelled both men firmly into the international limelight. Dujardin won Best Actor at Cannes for his irresistibly charming and charismatic turn as George Valentin, a slick-haired 1920s screen-idol who combines the smouldering Latin-lover magnetism of Rudolph Valentino with the lithe-limbed athleticism and easy-going swagger of the peerless Douglas Fairbanks Senior. And just as Fairbanks struggled to adapt to the coming of sound (Valentino had already gone to the great boudoir in the sky by the time of The Jazz Singer), Valentin suffers the indignity of a riches to (almost) rags decline, as the fickle ticket-buying public turns to fresher faces – and voices.

His precipitous fall mirrors the rapid rise from obscurity of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), a beanpole, bouncy re-imagining of Joan Crawford’s “flapper” persona – their diverging fortunes complicated by an on-off romantic relationship between the pair.

The Artist is a rousingly heartfelt tribute to a bygone, unfairly neglected cinematic era. Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman craft an affectionate, relatively lo-fi pastiche of 1920s movie-making styles. With its near-incessant jazz-age soundtrack and ­judiciously sparing use of sound effects, however, The Artist is no “silent” movie. And it certainly takes what experts might dub a casual approach to actual Hollywood chronology. But Hazanavicius does manage to capture the look and feel of films from the 1920s and ’30s – his eye for background detail is unobtrusively delightful.

Audiences will revel in the old-school star-quality of appealing leads Dujardin and Bejo, who enjoy a nonchalant kind of chemistry and hold their own against stiff competition more recognisable supporting players including John Goodman and James Cromwell. Even Malcolm McDowell pops up for a cameo, although it’s disappointing that the British veteran should be restricted to just a single brief scene.

Enjoying rather more screen-time is Valentin’s milk-white terrier Uggy, a ­delightful canine thespian evidently ­intended to stir memories of the Thin Man series’ Asta.

The modus operandi of the film is to present Margaret Thatcher nee Roberts as a tragic figure. She never wanted to be one of those women at the end of her life stuck behind a kitchen sink. Yet, in imagined scenes of her life in the noughties that top and tail the film that is where she ends up. If the film was any good, we would actually care. Reader, we do not.

Yet you could actually present Thatcher as sympathetic if you understood what she thought about her decisions then and now. The film, written by Abi Morgan and ­directed by Phyllida Lloyd, avoids its real subject – politics – for much of its length. Lloyd says in the film’s production notes that she did not want to make a political movie. In which case, she really took on the wrong subject. As a biopic, it reminds one of the ­cartoons of Thatcher that filled newspapers for over a decade. It makes broad assumptions without filling in the details.  Worse, its starting point is that Margaret never holds herself to account – she is missing her beloved Denis (Jim Broadbent, in comedy sidekick mode) who has recently died. We see her talking to him as a ghost, unable to throw out his suits – after all, he still needs them. I didn’t understand much about Denis watching this film. It might have been more rewarding – if humanising Margaret was the aim – to attempt to portray their marriage and how it ebbed and flowed as Mrs T exercised power.

Too much of the film is spent with Streep in old lady make-up being barely engaged in her surroundings – we first see her in a corner shop buying a pint of milk, not recognised as a former public hate figure; I didn’t believe that she could leave the house without a police escort. The first flashback is cheesy – she signs her name as Margaret Roberts. (“Oh dear, why did I do that?” As if). Streep gives way to Alexandra Roach as the young Margaret who is altogether more likeable, overcoming the prejudice against women entering politics in the 1950s. We see her meet the young Denis, lose her first election but succeed in her second attempt at Finchley. Streep does not re-appear until we see Mrs T in ­Parliament in the early ’70s answering questions as Education Secretary.

The film’s essential problem is thatit  tries to cram too much in its 106-minute length. It is too short. If you are going to cast Michael Pennington as Michael Foot or Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine – I rather like the idea of Heseltine in Withnail  mode intoning: “Give me more booze”– then at least give them some chunky scenes. Eleven years in power is squashed into 30 minutes, with the defence of the Falkland Islands  ­giving way to the miners’ strik and then the poll tax riots. In the case of the first two events, they are perceived only in terms of political capital – that is, how The Sun saw her.

The omissions are quite striking. No Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev. No selling off of council houses. None of the creation of the “me’”culture. There is a striking irony that the identity of “Margaret Thatcher” is a social construct that invited people to take responsibility for their lives but is rather soulless. We learn that she loves her twins – Carol (Olivia Colman) appears, Mark is absent, as if for legal ­reasons. There are intended contemporary ­parallels when Thatcher justifies difficult decisions made at a time of austerity, but no attempt to present trade unionism as sympathetically as its antithesis. In the end, this is precisely why The Iron Lady attracted ire at the screening I attended – with the publicist writing to me to ask if I knew anything about the “disturbing” shouting at the screen, as if all reviewers for left-wing magazines had Tourette’s. It ­invites the clichéd response to organised labour – that it is self-interested without changing the majority of workers’ lives for the better. The film deserves the iron elbow.

First the farce of farces: Noises Off. Set entirely in a theatre, the story shows a company of actors performing a fictional farce called Nothing On three times: first as a dress rehearsal, then from backstage as the rivalries between the various company members hot up, and finally from the front again as these antagonisms erupt and ­disrupt the whole performance.

This is one of the few plays that is ­genuinely hilarious each time you see it, perhaps because it reminds you just how dangerous performing can be (the way things go wrong is appalling, and ­appallingly funny) and of course it’s also sheer fun. Dramatic reversals of fortune, on stage and off, lots of slapstick and some ­brilliant lines all combine to make this one of British drama’s most sublime comedies. Yes, it really is that good.

But as well as being pure joy, Noises Off also explores the realities of theatre. The characters include the grumpy director, who is having affairs with his stage manager and young actress, the gossipy star, the veteran actor who asks awkward questions about the playtext, and the old drunk who has to be kept away from drink at all costs. All the boredom, panic, exhilaration and depression of performing in public is beautifully caricatured.

The exaggeration also works as a perfect vehicle for showing how love runs riot among a small company of people, and reminds us that every age – even the liberated present – has social rules and conventions whose ludicrous disruption is the stuff of comedy. As the actors run amok on the stage, each pursuing their own goals, the threat of chaos and the joys of anarchy jump across the footlights.

Lindsey Posner’s excellent cast – led by Robert Glenister as the director and Celia Imrie as one of the actors – perform with precision and expert timing. Janie Dee as another of the actors and Karl Johnson as the drunken old trouper are similarly well cast. I also liked Jonathan Coy, whose performance lends his actor character a nicely bewildered expression. This is a classy version of classic play.

The Charity That Began at Home is a much less familiar piece, written by St John Hankin, who was an Edwardian playwright in the era of George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville Barker. Now largely ­forgotten, but championed by the

ever-resourceful Sam Walters of the Orange Tree Theatre, this is an interesting satire on sanctimonious do-gooding.

Set in the country house of the landed gentry, the play focuses on Lady Denison and her daughter Margery, who both have been convinced by Basil, a non-conformist preacher, that true hospitality involves not inviting your friends to stay, but instead ­asking folk who are either boring or ­unpleasant, or both. This self-sacrifice is the mark of true charity.

So their guests for a house party include Hugh Verreker, an attractive young man who has a scandalous past, General Bonsor, a prize bore, Mrs Horrocks, a vulgarian, and Miss Triggs, a teacher of German. Because the hospitality of their hosts extends to ­employing unsuitable but needy individuals as servants, there is plenty of scope for bad behaviour and social comedy.

Likewise, it is a joy to watch how the best laid plans of Basil, founder of the Church of Humanity, and his most recent converts, run into the sands of human ­nature and our proven propensity for bad behaviour. Much of the drama comes from Verreker’s critical approach to social ­convention, and from Lady Denison’s sister-in-law, who can’t comprehend the sudden conversion of the household to this new ideology.

Director Auriol Smith’s excellent production brings out both the comedy and the critical edge of the piece, which also discovers in Verreker an example of the self-sacrificing Englishman, a stage type that was to become common in the plays of Terence Rattigan later in the 20th century. In order to behave really morally, a man has to play the part of a mocking jester before giving up his love life. At their best, the cast deliver excellent performances. Paula Stockbridge and Olivia Morgan as Lady Denison and her daughter are just right, while Oliver Gomm as Verreker and Damien Matthews as Basil are simultaneously ambiguous and compelling to watch. In the comic roles, Philip York, Rosemary Smith and Shuna Snow are delightfully amusing, and Rebecca Saire as Lady Denison’s sister-in-law is pleasingly provocative.

St John Hankin’s play is well-constructed and argues its case with precision and humanity. It illustrates how any ideology, and especially those religious ideas that preach charity as the be-all and end-all of life, are doomed to failure because they take no account of human nature. At the same time, he wickedly suggests that human ­nature is not a given, but is created by us, through our own action. This spirited ­revival is a real rediscovery.

Two years later, Afghan forces annihilated a British army in what was then described as “Britain’s greatest Asian defeat”. In 1842, British forces, officially called the Army of Retribution, retook Kabul for two weeks of rape, slaughter and destruction. Both the Tory Government and the Whig opposition wanted to keep British troops in Afghanistan, but the Governor-General of India, Lord Ellenborough, sensibly ordered withdrawal.

In the Second Afghan War, of 1878-80, Afghan forces defeated a British army at the Battle of Maiwand. Britain lost 1,000 men, more than one-third of its force. It was called “the worst British defeat on the battlefield in Asia”.

In 1893, the British Government drew the Durand line, marking Afghanistan’s southern border with India. It partitioned the Pushtun land of Waziristan. As David Loyn, a foreign correspondent with IRN and then the BBC for more than 30 years, points out: “By insisting on control of the passes, and pushing the border into the Pushtun mountain fastness of Waziristan, Britain ensured permanent instability in the frontier region, with consequences ­lasting until today.”

Thus the British army’s annual campaigns on India’s North-West Frontier, which provoked the uprising of 1897. Fifty years of destroying mosques and minarets, villages and crops, brought not peace but “a rich harvest of hatred and revenge”, as Lord Roberts admitted.

In the Third Afghan War, of 1919, British forces sensibly mutinied, refusing orders to move up the Khyber Pass. Afghanistan won its independence from Britain and, with independence, 60 years of relative peace. Then, when the Daoud government introduced some mild reforms, Islamist rebels took up arms against the government, five years before the ­Soviet Union intervened.

The CIA intervened in this civil war, in July 1979, before the Soviet Union. When the socialist ­government cancelled the debt the peasants owed their landlords, and tried to redistribute land to the peasants, the landlords led a rural insurgency.

Britain, perhaps inevitably, intervened in this civil war, too, on the side of the landlords and the Islamists. Loyn says: “The CIA operative who ran the war, Gust Avrakotos, said the Brits had ‘a willingness to do jobs that I could not touch’. They ­basically took care of the ‘How to Kill ­People Department’. When the CIA was facing criticism for providing an ‘assassination manual’ to gangs in Nicaragua, this British support filled a useful gap.”

Afghanistan is a country possible to seize, but impossible to hold. Those who do not learn from history are proverbially doomed to repeat it and, as Loyn points out in this splendid survey of the many wars fought across that benighted country, many of them have been as a result of our politicians’ refusal to learn the lessons of history.

During his academic career, McKibbin has drawn magisterially on political, social and cultural history to explore the dynamics of modern Britain. He is also, as readers of his remarkable columns in the London Review of Books know, a brilliant commentator on current affairs, writing from a position on the Labour left that barely seems represented in politics any more – but one that Tribune readers would appreciate.

Parties and People is an interpretation of the development of party politics in the first half of the 20th century. For those who enjoy big ideas about politics, this is quite a bargain. McKibbin explains why Britain acquired the kind of democracy it did: a form of politics geared to moderate social change but which did not disrupt the existing constitutional arrangements. Yes to a welfare state but hands off the monarchy and first past the post.

The Great War killed off Edwardian ­progressivism and left a politics in which Labour and the Conservatives represented the two major social classes. Unlike some Labour historians, McKibbin has never had a problem writing insightfully about the Tories. Although Labour may have formed two governments in the inter-war period, the era was dominated by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives. Nor did Labour enjoy a ­monopoly of the working class vote. At the 1918, 1931 and 1935 general elections, the Tories were supported by at least half of working-class voters.

Some readers may be shocked by McKibbin’s claim that “more than Labour, the Conservative Party in the 1930s was the party of the working class” but he makes his case. The Second World War was a disaster for the Tories. When Labour entered the coalition in 1940, the Conservatives could no longer employ the anti-socialist rhetoric that had been their stock in trade since 1918. This changed the political weather and made Labour’s victory in 1945 possible in a way it would not otherwise have been. Labour’s views of the “political, ceremonial and emotional forms” of the state were, he says, “largely Tory”.

Classes, Cultures & Politics is an example of that curious form of academic ­publishing, the festschrift (a volume of ­essays in honour of a major scholar). Here former students, friends and colleagues pay tribute to McKibbin or provide pieces inspired by his work. Such volumes are often of variable quality but this one is first rate. McKibbin’s Orwellian brilliance in identifying apparently trivial aspects of British life and illuminating their significance is matched by many of the contributors. Ever wondered why cab drivers are so right-wing? John Davis’ essay gives us the answer. They are essentially small business owners or, to put it another way, petit bourgeois. Ever wondered why Mills & Boon ­romances are big on doctors and nurses? Joseph McAleer relates it to the development of the NHS. Do you know why the Just William stories are infused by Richmal Crompton’s Conservatism? Check out William Whyte’s bravura article.

Ross McKibbin has encouraged a rich and complex approach to British history. We are all in his debt.