STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin

The Third Reich of Dreams
Charlotte Beradt, Princeton University Press, £20
DREAMS, from the earliest times, have been topics of fascination, and even fear. What do they mean? Why do we have them? Despite the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung there are as yet no definitive answers. However it cannot be denied that, no matter how confusing, the events and emotions experienced in dreams must find their origin in the world of everyday reality.
Charlotte Beradt, a young, freelance, Jewish journalist working in Berlin in 1933 found herself trapped in nightly panic dreams which she recognised as responses to the Nazi nightmare the whole of her society were about to enter. Over the next six years, until the outbreak of war when she had to leave the country, she collected, with skill and courage, dream narratives of hundreds of her fellow Berliners.

GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare


