ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
Plague Songs by Martin Rowson and Jon Tregenna
Hammering home the reality of the pickle into which we have been summarily purloined by a cabal of crooks, liars and thieves, writes Tom King
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
SHAKESPEARE apparently made the most of plague-induced quarantine to write King Lear, which certainly puts my own productivity these past nine months into rather dire perspective.
Nor is it helped by Martin Rowson, irreverent cartoonist and jobbing poet, who took the opportunity over lockdown to pen an almost-daily torrent of stanzas in which he cast his impudent, ribald, deeply unsentimental gaze over the unfolding catastrophe.
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STEVE JOHNSON salutes the mellifluous tones and clear-minded political message of a uniquely relevant Birmingham-born singer-songwriter