MARJORIE MAYO recommends an accessible and unsettling novel that uses a true incident of death in the Channel to raise questions of wider moral responsibility
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Mexico’s Soviet kiss
GAVIN O’TOOLE recommends a book that examines the ‘invisible’ cultural cross-fertilisation that has bypassed the globalisation peddled by the West
Lolita Torres in A fiance for Laura, 1955
MIK SABIERS wallows in a night of political punk and funk that fires both barrels at Trump
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz
SIMON DUFF recommends a new album from renowned composer and oud player Anour Brahem.
JAMES WALSH has a great night in the company of basketball players, quantum physicists and the exquisite timing of Rosie Jones
A New Awakening: Adventures In British Jazz 1966 - 1971, G3, and Buck Owens
JAMES WALSH is moved by an exhibition of graphic art that relates horrors that would be much less immediate in other media
Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture
by Masha Salazkina
University of California Press, £25
WHY would a mother in the Soviet Union of the early 1960s as it clawed its way out of the darkness of Stalinism into a new dawn name her daughter Lolita — and not Audrey, Marilyn, Lucille or Debbie?
After all, the latter were setting aflame the passions of the Western world as Hollywood starlets became the face of a new form of cinema extending US cultural imperialism and the “American way of life” across the globe.
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