Readers Digress 26/03/10

Welcome to this week’s further reading / listening / watching round-up. Enjoy!

• On the Guardian website, John Caird’s Top 10 Survival Tips for any aspiring theatre directors

– John Caird will be taking part in a National Theatre Platform with actor Simon Russell Beale on Friday 9th April at 6pm

• Frances Stonor Saunders’ account of Violet Gibson – aka The Woman Who Shot Mussolini – as heard recently on BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week

• Rachel Polonsky’s skatulochka – that’s Russian for ‘jewellery box’ according to the Daily Telegraph – Molotov’s Magic Lantern on Radio 4’s Open Book

• In April we publish Emily Woof’s debut novel, The Whole Wide Beauty. Ahead of publication she wrote this feature for the Guardian’s Family section

• Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, whose new book Courtiers is published in May, is named as one of the 50 Women to Watch in the Arts

• Alex Preston, author of This Bleeding City, interviewed by Mariella Frostrup on Open Book

• Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Stories appeared in March. Here’s Hanif reflecting on middle age on Radio 4’s Today Programme

• ‘You’ll struggle to find a more readable exegesis of Homer’s epic’ wrote the Sunday Times about Caroline Alexander’s The War that Killed Achilles. Here’s Caroline discussing the book, again on Start the Week

And finally …

• Spotted last Sunday evening (March 21st) on the BBC’s fine series, Seven Ages of Britain, was a 5-minute long segment [20 mins in] devoted to Mass Observation, the social research organisation from the 1930s onwards which set out to record the daily lives of ordinary people. David Dimbleby clutched in his hand and read from a copy of The Pub and the People, one of 12 M.O. books now available in Faber Finds. [Here they all are].

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