GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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Biography: Joseph Conrad
Enlightening overview of a literary pioneer
SPOOKY: Russian spy Verloc (Toby Jones, right) is instructed by Vladimir (David Dawson) to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 2016 BBC production of The Secret Agent
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
IN A Penguin readers’ list of the 100 must-read classic novels, Joseph Conrad appears only once, at number 92.
Unsurprisingly, the named work is his short novella Heart of Darkness, often found on college syllabuses and the subject of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster film, Apocalypse Now, which relocated the action from the menacing hinterland of the turn-of-the-century Congo to the US genocide in Vietnam.
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RON JACOBS welcomes the long overdue translation of an epic work that chronicles resistance to fascism during WWII
ALISTAIR FINDLAY welcomes a collection of essays from one of the cultural left’s most respected speakers and activists
The Morning Star sorts the good eggs from the rotten scoundrels of the year