fri 29/03/2024

Soviet Union

Storyville: Masterspy of Moscow - George Blake, BBC Four

“The righteous traitor” must be as provocative a subtitle as any when the subject is espionage. Director George Carey nevertheless used it in this highly revealing film about George Blake, the “spy who got away”, which proved as much about the...

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CD: Public Service Broadcasting - The Race for Space

The 1960s media's wild excitement about the space race is now almost forgotten. The era when every boy wanted to be an astronaut is ancient history. The period is, however, a goldmine for gloriously kitsch cosmic samples, a fact electronic...

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Black Sea

Despite the presence of Jude Law as a disillusioned old underseadog, the real star of Black Sea is the 50-year-old Russian submarine on which most of the action takes place. Now called Black Widow, the vessel lives on the river Medway near Rochester...

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David Schneider Makes Stalin Laugh

When Dostoyevsky was asked why he wrote Crime and Punishment he famously replied, “To further my career and get shortlisted for book prizes.” He didn’t, of course. I made that up. But what artist/writer/actor creates a piece of art/writing/acting...

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Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal, BBC Two

History may be written by the winners, but its verdict is surely still out on Kim Philby. The presenter of Kim Philby: His Most Intimate Betrayal, Ben Macintyre, acknowledged that Philby is “the most famous double agent in history”, but though such...

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The Silent War, BBC Two

The cumulative effect of the BBC's Cold War season hasn't been to remind us that truth is stranger than fiction so much as to demonstrate how they swirled together into a miasma of delusion and uncertainty. We've seen Reds under the bed and spies in...

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The Spy Who Went Into the Cold, BBC Four

How much time does anyone want to spend in the company of Kim Philby? BBC Four’s Storyville allotted him 75 minutes, which isn’t much to tell the story of a third man with two paymasters and four wives. And yet this portrait somehow contrived to...

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Belcea Quartet, Wigmore Hall

Pure, unorthodox genius: the terms apply both to the three works on the Belcea Quartet’s programme – Haydn at his most compressed, Britten unbuttoned and sunny, Shostakovich hitting the tragic heights – and, if the term “genius” can be applied to re...

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Moser, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Michail Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

Imagine how discombobulated the audience must have felt at the 1962 premiere of Shostakovich’s most outlandish monster symphony, the Fourth, 26 years after its withdrawal at the rehearsal stage. Those of us hearing its natural successor, Schnittke’s...

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Tharaud, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, Nézet-Séguin, Royal Festival Hall

If ever there were a week for London to celebrate Poulenc in the lamentably under-commemorated 50th anniversary year of his death, this is it. Two major choral works and two fun concertos at last join the party. But if Figure Humaine and the...

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The Love Girl and the Innocent, Southwark Playhouse

Southwark Playhouse's new production of The Love Girl and the Innocent is London’s first in over 30 years, and there’s a reason Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s play rarely reaches the stage: it’s a lumpy mammoth of a script, demanding a cast upwards of 50...

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Preview: Solzhenitsyn's The Love Girl and the Innocent

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was two years out of prison camp when he wrote The Love Girl and the Innocent. The experience of the eight years of hell that followed his sentence in July 1945 for anti-Soviet activities gave the play its subject, one which...

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