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MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
Kneehigh drum up troubling totalitarian metaphor
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
GIVEN the current political climate, it’s easy to empathise with Oskar. On his third birthday, he decides to stop growing in protest against the world.
But that antipathy for human greed and folly starts early. Even before his umbilical cord has been cut, the narrator of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum pleads to be returned to the amniotic sac after Alfred — one of two “presumptive fathers” — sketches out his future as a greengrocer.
Set against a turbulent period in Europe’s history, starting with the conception of his mother Agnes in 1899 and taking in the rise of nazism — here renamed unspecifically as the Order — and Kristallnacht.
More from this author
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys, with minor reservations, the Northern Ballet’s revival of its 1992 classic
SUSAN DARLINGTON revels in an exhilarating adaptation of the gruesome fairytale that invokes the real-life horror of women lost to male violence
SUSAN DARLINGTON is disappointed by a show that aims to highlight misogyny within the police but fails to arrest the audience's attention
SUSAN DARLINGTON revels in a band that know their own continuing relevance
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PAUL FARMER relishes, and recommends a magisterial set from one of the great singer-songwriters