TONY BURKE plots the career of the legendary Senegalese band from Dakar nightclubs to Glastonbury
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Crime fiction
New books from Oscar de Muriel, Louise Penny and Amer Anwar
'OWNING' ASIAN WEST LONDON: Amer Anwar
RITA DI SANTO contemplates two films about journalism that opened this year’s festival
GEOFF BOTTOMS applauds a world-class production King Lear that pits late feudalism against a rising bourgeoisie
MARY CONWAY keeps up with the sheer pace of a drama about the terrible gap between sanitised reporting and real-life turmoil of race and gender
New releases from Brian Fallon, Antony Szmierek and Hollow Hand
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes a revival of Reginald Rose’s classic play that reminds us of the fundamental need for trials with juries
THE DANCE OF THE SERPENTS by Oscar de Muriel (Orion, £18.99) chronicles the further adventures of the two Victorian detectives who comprise the Commission for the Elucidation of Unsolved Cases Presumably Related to the Odd and Ghostly, a clandestine unit within the Edinburgh constabulary.
A sceptic and a believer, they are English toff Inspector Frey and his hard-as-girders Scots colleague, Inspector Nine-Nails McGray.
In this episode, they are commissioned, very much against their will and with threats hanging over their heads, to serve the hated prime minister Lord Salisbury. He needs their help in tracking down a long-lived criminal conspiracy of self-styled witches who have a mysterious hold over the increasingly erratic and bloated Queen Victoria.
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MATTHEW HAWKINS rakes through un-fancy words and flair-free summaries to find who and what might be flamboyant
DOUGLAS FIELD relishes the hard-boiled language, satire and humour of the third and last of the Harlem trilogy
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment