Some schoolgirls give their reactions to the Nigerian kidnapping and the issues raised. I found this simple but moving.

Elsewhere in The Guardian, the headline Move over Lizzie Bennet - let's hear it for the unsung heroine sounded like a response to my suggestion that we might have a break from Pride and Prejudice. It still started with Austen, ( Read more... )

On Sunday I went to the final performance of The Masque of Anarchy, part of the Manchester International Festival. The Masque is a poem by Shelley written in response to the Peterloo massacre, though as the programme pointed out he had a rather hazy grasp of events as he was in Italy at the time. It's not an account of the massacre, but of Murder ( Read more... )

I just discovered a short sound clip from the Donmar Julius Caesar which I saw in January on Radio Four - it's Harriet Walter and Jenny Jules discussing and then performing the start of the quarrel scene. Apparently this was the first drama ever broadcast on British radio, ninety years ago today, with Basil Gill and Robert Atkins as Brutus and ( Read more... )