Arts Reviews

Great news  – Radio Four is to employ a bunch of young black working class presenters, to replace all those old middle class white ones. Or at least I assume it is. The BBC Trust has decided that Radio Four is not adequately representing the population as a whole; it is too elderly, and too all that other stuff I mentioned. I think that the BBC Trust, like many middle class people, is guilty of synonymising “intelligence” and “middle class”. They hear someone using long words and immediately think they’re middle class. But John Humphrys isn’t from a middle class background, nor Roger McGough. But perhaps they are right, the

Lloyd Evans talks to Sophie Thompson, whose lack of vanity defines her approach to acting Straight off, as soon as I meet Sophie Thompson, I can see the look she’s striving for. Elegant ragamuffin. Torn jeans, scruffy trainers and a charity-shop blouse all offset by some peachy designer accessory worth five grand. Then I realise there’s no peachy accessory. She’s just pulled on her gardening gear and left it at that. And not a trace of make-up either which, for a woman over 45 — even though she looks ten years younger — is either reckless or bold. Or perhaps just genuinely modest. Thompson is starring in the social satire

There was a fabulously daft and self regarding woman called Marina something or other talking about Egypt on Question Time last night. In a prize for the Most Useless Woman Ever to Appear On Question Time she would certainly be in the top five, although probably below Katie Hopkins. I was supposed to be on this week but couldn’t face the journey back from Workington: I assume Melanie Phillips was my replacement. The Egypt business continues to baffle the west. Truth is, foul although the despotic leaders of most middle eastern countries undoubtedly are, they are more liberal and more pleasant than almost anything the people of that region yearn

LP Hartley could not have been more wrong. The past is not a foreign country to which we can never return. It fills the minds of the living and stops us seeing the present clearly. My Observer colleague Andrew Rawnsley tells our nervous readers this morning that David Cameron and George Osborne have no Plan B for the economy. They believe they are right and will not change course, in part because the myths of the past possess them, specifically the myth of 1981. “The final reason why they do not have a Plan B flows from the way they interpret history. The prime minister and the chancellor are keen

Mark Greaves talks to the artist Peter Howson about his latest commission and his demons Peter Howson started hallucinating last summer. Lying awake at night, he saw what he describes as ‘devils, demons and goblins’. They told him there was no point in living; that he might as well do away with himself. It was, he says, probably the worst year of his life. He felt as if he had been abandoned by God. At times he says he couldn’t really walk or see. He made himself feel better by reading the Book of Job — in which Job’s children die, his possessions are destroyed and his skin covered in