RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
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Unfinished business
Simon Gray's play on Soviet double agent George Blake is disappointingly incomplete, says LYNNE WALSH
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
Cell Mates
Hampstead Theatre, London
HERE'S a jigsaw piece in the story of 95-year-old former MI6 officer George Blake, now living in a dacha close to Moscow, who recently gave interviews saying that he held fast to his communist beliefs and remained optimistic.
Double agent Blake, sentenced five years earlier to 42 years in prison, was helped in his “comic-book” escape from Wormwood Scrubs to the Soviet Union in 1966 by petty criminal Sean Bourke.
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