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Adventurous selection of works has a common preoccupation with the ebb and flow of private and public histories

One Man in His Time review: Gently tightening our grip on Shakespeare We’re sorry, this service is currently unavailable. Please try again later. Dismiss Save Normal text size ★★★½ Playhouse, March 11 If John Bell is anything to go by, basking in the words of William Shakespeare for 65 years is good for the soul. Exuding a calm generosity of spirit, he spent an hour conveying his singular love for this greatest of writers, artists and perhaps minds. Bell was blessed with school teachers who fostered this obsession – which, in turn, prompted him to act. In his 20s h...

Last modified on Wed 10 Mar 2021 10.34 EST Trevor Peacock, the actor and songwriter, who has died aged 89 after suffering from dementia, was best known and much loved for his endearing performance as a bumbling parish councillor, Jim Trott, in The Vicar of Dibley (1994-2007), one of a delightful gallery of village worthies circling, and answering to, Dawn French’s enthusiastic parish priest. Jim’s particular dimness was manifest in an acute inability to say what he meant, prefacing a “Yes” with a string of stuttering “No’s”. This had landed him in deep trouble. He had, for insta...

Commentary: What 'Hamlet' has to say about Trump's impeachment trial Charles McNulty © (Manuel Harlan/ Carol Rosegg) Two Hamlets: Andrew Scott, left, in London in 2017, and Oscar Isaac in New York City in 2017. (Manuel Harlan/ Carol Rosegg) Samuel Johnson once observed that “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” A rebellion turns out to work equally well for sharpening one’s understanding of a dramatic classic. Rereading “Hamlet” after the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, I was struck by how fears of ins...

In Search of Precedent in Unprecedented Times Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons The first essay I wrote in Cambridge was on the Black Death. As I trawled through the fourteenth-century chroniclers, suffering from a dreadful bout of Freshers’ Flu, I couldn’t help but find descriptions of my symptoms wherever I looked.  ‘For several days they spend most of each day asleep, weighed down by drowsiness’, wrote the anonymous author of a German treatise on the plague. That certainly rang true. The bishop of Rochester, Thomas Brinton, insinuated in a sermon of 1375 that my affliction was a pu...