The deceased were elsewhere, in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory…” But then in the very next paragraph, ?ropos the medieval habit of drinking, fighting and dancing on hallowed ground, she claims: “We should remember that the bond between the living and the dead was very different from today....

Maybe this riven community are learning a collective lesson by re-enacting the tragedy. Meckler has previously (with Shared Experience) excelled at physical theatre, and she produces a poignant final image here. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works festival kicked off this week: an excitingly...

He got to Epsom by the skin of his teeth, and won by a similar margin. Meanwhile the brilliant winner, George Washington, emerged from his defeat by Araafa in the Irish 2,000 Guineas with pulled muscles, and misses Royal Ascot next week.In his absence Araafa, who had been fourth at Newmarket, was yesterday...

And, though most clich?deplete our responses (and effectively tranquillise our emotions) there’s something about this one that can often make us more responsive to the constructed anxieties of cinema. We might briefly imagine ourselves to be getting God’s view of the ground, but we never...

Paul Goodman was able to lower the tone of the session sufficiently to point that out.Some weeks ago, the Chancellor told the media his favourite all-time footballing moment had been England’s Paul Gascoigne scoring the winning goal against Scotland.In the taxonomy of falsehoods that was a lie....

What prospects for British diplomacy if everybody behaves like a loose cannon, whatever the moral justification?Murray realises that, by protesting about the uselessness of intelligence obtained under torture, he had inadvertently uncovered the basis of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition”...

The narrative centres on the powerful nostalgia of a house in time, within a landscape that records the passage of generations. When Anna ponders Fairhurst’s picture, she wonders “for a mad moment” what it would be like if the picture were a two-way window. The novel, beginning at the...

When the state becomes buoyant with the possibility of improvement, he swells up like a hot air balloon, causing speculation that a curse has been put upon him.”The playfulness with language you find in the novel is very much to do with the language it was written in,” the author explains...