MARIA DUARTE, LEO BOIX and ANGUS REID review Brides, Dead of Winter, A Night Like This, and The Librarians
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Spying for the GDR: a woman’s perspective
JENNY FARRELL welcomes the first memoir to be published in English from a woman’s point of view, giving the perspective of a GDR spy
TRIGGER FACTOR: Mass peace demonstration in Bonn against the modernisation of nuclear weapons in Western Europe ie stationing US SS-20 and Pershing II missiles
[Pic: Rob Bogaerts/Anefo/CC] ![REBELS: Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar in Nadia Fall’s powerful debut feature Brides [Pic: IMDb]](https://msd11.gn.apc.org/sites/default/files/styles/desktop/public/2025-09/round%20up%20web_0.jpg.webp?itok=41xI6jhN)
MARY CONWAY recommends an early Shakespearean tragedy that feels so contemporary that it mirrors our daily news
A ghost story by Mexican Ave Barrera, a Surrealist poetry collection by Peruvian Cesar Moro, and a manifesto-poem on women’s labour and capitalist havoc by Peruvian Valeria Roman Marroquin
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends a dazzling production of Bernstein’s opera set in a world where chaos and violence are greeted by equanimity
MARY CONWAY is frustrated by a new play that loses its drama amid the moral dilemma of re-settling children in the aftermath of WWII
Acclaimed as a masterpiece when it premiered, this study of story-telling in an Irish pub more than lives up to expectations, says MARY CONWAY
SYLVIA HIKINS relishes a comedy that dives deep into Liverpool’s divided loyalties
The Shadow in the Shadow
Beatrice Altman-Schevitz, Verlag Das Freie Buch, £23.99
SPY thrillers about and accounts of East-West spying during the cold war abound, always written from a particular Western political standpoint. Autobiographies relating the stories of former “agents for peace” on the other hand are rare. Beatrice Altman-Schevitz’s The Shadow in the Shadow is the only such memoir to be published in English from a woman’s point of view, giving the perspective of a GDR spy.
Beatrice’s newly published autobiography tells the extraordinary life-story of two left-wing US-Americans.
Jeffrey, a graduate of the elite Princeton University, was an activist in the free speech movement and very active in the anti-Vietnam war movement. Beatrice’s political awakening occurred in Buffalo and the Attica Prison uprising in 1971 and the court case that followed it. “The injustice was too much for me to remain silent,” she writes.
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With most of recorded history dominated by the voices of men, LYNNE WALSH encourages sisters to read the memoirs of women – and to write their own too
The fall of the Berlin Wall enabled neofascist activity to spill over into East Germany, laying the groundwork for the strengthening of right-wing forces today, writes JACOB YASKO
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