The grand consolation offered is that the geek will inherit the earth

The grand consolation offered is that the geek will inherit the earth.Three motifs predominate: people “stiffen”, “sob”, “shake”. He learned just how intractable audiences could be when, his family having had their fill of his soliloquies, he declaimed to their herd of cows Bovine applause came in the shape of plops. He learned the art of Shakespearean dialogue – and uneasy insights into grown-up stuff – from sparring with his sister He learned about the permission the stage can grant. In Shakespeare he found a universal guru, a balm for his hurt mind, a human hero and a cheeky accomplice. His father, an accomplished and revolutionary director (he gave the world a brutally cut production of Julius Caesar in which he “starred” as Mark Antony), taught him about the twin poles of pantheism and nihilism in Shakespeare.

A series of gurus taught him that to get to the fertile valleys you had to pass over some very dry rocks. The critics Bradley and Leavis, both now derided by the modish Pharisees of modernism and postmodernism, taught him the value of character and textual analysis respectively.In tandem with these influences, he had the precedent of his parents and grandparents, whose response to the theatre was both ferociously visceral and priestly. An inevitably one-sided affair, but one shouldn’t quibble.
Like all such relationships, it had its dips and disillusions His wide-eyed childish love gave way to adolescent cynicism. Rather it is the living chronicle of a relationship: his own passionate and turbulent love affair with Shakespeare. For all the angst and wonder, magic, mysticism and fierce political awareness Dromgoole identifies in Shakespeare, this remains for me the central image of the book.

For Dromgoole, Shakespeare is the great high priest of the inconsistent, the anarchic, the life-loving His book is not an autobiography, nor even really a memoir. But the real peculiarity lay in the blown-up condom which the addict had tugged over his head like a cap. They were talking in deeply academic terms about the production they’d just seen, when one of the drug-addled pub habitu?began darting among them, offering “nonsensical phrases of agreement”. I can’t remember the last time I read such a moving piece of non-fiction. This week Bad Faith was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize It deserves to win hands down.. When Dominic Dromgoole, the new artistic director of the Globe, was working at the Bush theatre, he observed a crowd of intense theatrical types milling about the pub below the venue.

But this is a book of devastating power, written with a novelist’s eye for character and with an acute delineation of secrets, loss and grief. “The murder of children, like the eating of flesh,” writes Callil, “is not easily done.” Yet Vichy France managed it.Bad Faith is a book of passion and anger which, nonetheless, manages to keep its head as a significant work of history. Like most neophyte authors, Callil sometimes throws in more detail than is necessary; occasionally, outside her main focus, she rushes to generalisations that don’t bear close scrutiny (in particular, her remarks about France in the Great War). To make up the shortfall in their target numbers, Vichy officials, led by Darquier, separated thousands of children from their parents and exterminated them as well. The Vichy government deported around 75,000 of the 850,000 Jews they believed to be living in France. Over 70,000 were sent to Auschwitz, where well over half of them were gassed on arrival; only 2,564 survivors returned to France.