Usa

There’s a part of me that thinks OK, we’ve heard enough now, one year on from the beginning of the centenary commemorations, about the first world war. Do we really need any more programmes (on radio or television) about Ypres, Gallipoli, Akaba, Versailles, and the Western Front? Or are we wallowing in history’s horror stories rather than trying to learn from them? There’s a danger that anniversary fatigue will set in and stop us pausing to think, to really contemplate, the reality of that terrible, catastrophic war and whether there is any way it can be prevented from happening again. But then events, as ever, take over, such as the

About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made a palpable hit both locally and internationally. Locally it revealed what one might have guessed, that the inhabitants of Manhattan’s downtown suffered a severe lack of amenity. Every place to walk or run or ride a bike, every place to exercise the dog, is valuable and well used. This new and unusual park, restoring and converting the tracks of a disused overhead railway, was reserved neither for running nor biking nor walking the dog, but rather for strolling, sitting and sunbathing, and for the novelty of looking in on buildings

A lot of people ask what it takes to be a stand-up comic — I’ll be honest, I have absolutely no idea. What I do know is that whatever it is, a lot of people love to think they’ve either got it or they can get it. I was honoured to be in six Royal Command Performances and so of course I met Her Majesty the Queen a few times. After about the third time, she started to talk like me, tell a few jokes. Now, I’m not saying she owes her popularity to me — God forbid — but let’s be honest, when you add together the number of

Avengers: Age of Ultron is the second film in the Avengers franchise, as written and directed by Joss Whedon, and stars Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark (Iron Man), Chris Evans as Captain America, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye and Mark Ruffalo as Dr Bruce Banner, aka the Incredible Hulk, who probably had to be included, as no one would have wished to piss him off. (‘IF HULK NOT IN MOVIE HULK WILL THROW CAR!’) I am not among the target audience for this particular genre, but I attended with my son (22), which was useful, as I found it confusing —

Dead Sheep is a curious dramatic half-breed that examines Geoffrey Howe’s troubled relationship with Margaret Thatcher. Structurally it’s a Mexican bean. It leaps all over the 1980s and it keeps shifting genre from cabaret to tragedy via cheesy political satire. Some actors are impersonators, some are caricaturists, some are neither. James Wilby’s study of Howe avoids his personal mannerisms, the pensive shabbiness, the punctilious, worried eyes, and the soft beguiling purr of his vocal chords. Instead Wilby presents him as a bewildered monk tiptoeing around a lion’s den. Steve Nallon does Mrs Thatcher as a drag-queen which looks pretty odd next to Wilby’s straightforward Howe but Nallon is a master

Woman in Gold feels rather like a Jewish version of Philomena as this too is about an older woman seeking justice for what has been stolen from her in the past but, unlike the Jewish version of almost everything, this is not in any way superior, and may even be a dud. It is based on a true story, which is an excellent and fascinating story, but it’s the storytelling that counts, and the storytelling here is not only familiar and pedestrian, but so emotionally manipulative that it doesn’t come with one sentimental ending, but several in quick succession. ‘Oh good, it’s over,’ you will think to yourself, as you