John Baker’s Blog

Equus, Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, tells the story of a psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man convicted of blinding six horses.
Over the weekend we were lucky enough to catch the touring version at Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre. The play opened at the National Theatre in 1973 and was subsequently performed all over the [...]

Dick Jones offers us a poem and talks about the poet, David Harsent author of the collection, Legion.
I think of Akhmatova’s famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova and said: “Can you describe this?” When Akhmatova said, “I can”, a ghost [...]

Amazon’s reply to criticism of its recent POD announcement, insisting that POD publishers use its own BookSurge publishing service.
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Joan Didion’s memoir about trying to come to terms with her husband’s death became ‘the indispensable handbook to bereavement’. Then her 39-year-old daughter also died. As The Year of Magical Thinking arrives in London, David Hare describes [...]

This play came to the York Theatre Royal via the West End and Broadway, and a few other places. It won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy and garnered a host of positive critical reviews:
“Rollicking fun” The Times
“Dizzyingly entertaining” The Telegraph
“A joyous version of the Hitchcock classic” Sunday Times
So we were expecting [...]