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GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
On a Dark Night With Enough Wind by Lilla Pennant
Evocative accounts of life on the edge in rural Wales
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
LILLA PENNANT’S real-life stories from the remote north Wales villages of Tremeirchion and Sodom — drawn from conversations she had with old residents back in the 1970s and ‘80s — have about them the faint whiff of witchcraft and paganism, allied to a nicely crafted atmosphere of rain and wind on the hillsides and moors thereabouts.
What they don’t have, though, is a great deal of substance. Despite vague allusions to long-held secrets that Pennant might be able to uncover, nothing much is ever revealed, at least in terms of old-time magic or druidic practices.
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