Society

Remember Me . . . is the story of a ten-year love affair, which begins in the early 1960s when Joe, an undergraduate polymath from the north, persuades Natasha, French, artistic, mysterious and slightly older than him, to trust him and finally to fall in love with him. Melvyn Bragg ensures that we see their life together at every stage along the way, and from every point of view. The consequence is that the novel details not only the many nuances that affect the relationship, but the excitement of young professional success at the BBC, of gaining a circle of trusted friends and of learning to write novels. Nearly all

Bliss Royal Court Peter Pan, El Musical Garrick The Last Days of Judas Iscariot Almeida The Royal Court’s anointed one, Caryl Churchill, has translated a new play, Bliss, by the Canadian writer Olivier Choinière. Bliss goes like this. Four shelf-stackers dressed in supermarket fatigues stand in a communal lavatory. They narrate a long dreary tale about Céline Dion, her family and some journalists. After half an hour, there’s a new story. A pregnant woman, whose body lacks genital or cloacal apertures, is forced to give birth by firing the foetus through her sealed rectum while she explodes. At least I think that’s what it was about. When their tales end

At the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s new novel a charismatic Florentine rogue arrives at the Mughal court and claims to have a story which he must tell to the Emperor, Akbar the Great, who, he insists, is his nephew. At the beginning of Salman Rushdie’s new novel a charismatic Florentine rogue arrives at the Mughal court and claims to have a story which he must tell to the Emperor, Akbar the Great, who, he insists, is his nephew. The claim of kinship seems implausible, but Akbar’s older relatives admit that there is a family secret involving a pale-skinned, mythically beautiful princess named Qara Köz, who was born 100 years earlier