Since the British Library split and moved away in 1973, the glorious space has been redundant. But it has recently been used as an exhibition space for:

·      The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army 13 September 2007 - 6 April 2008

• Hadrian: Empire and Conflict 24 July- 27 October 2008
• Shah 'Abbas: The Remaking of Iran 19 February - 14 June
•  Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler 24 September 2009 -24 January 2010
• Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings
  22 April - 25 July 2010
• Journey through the afterlife: ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead 4 November 2010 - 6 March 2011
• Treasures of Heaven: saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe 23 June - 9 October 2011

And from the 26^th January to 15^th April, it is home to Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam. 

19th-C  Egyptian mahmal, ceremonial palanquin, symbol of the sultan's authority over the holy places (Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art)

I have seen, wondered at, and reviewed - enthusiastically - all the previous items in this list, with the slight exception of the relics show last year. (I felt a little skeptical about the organisers' silence about the magical aspects of these religious objects, which were logically on a par with those venerated or used by, say, followers of voodoo. Curators have no difficulty using the word "superstition" if the makers and worshippers of the objects are black. Doesn't this also apply to white Christians who believe in the efficacy of splinters of the True Cross and the virtue of ancient fragments of bone?) 

So there are some of my cards on the table already: I am made uneasy by the uncritical presentation of religious belief. In "Treasures of Heaven" I was able to see through to the beauty and craftsmanship of most of the many objects on display, without being made nervous by the nature what was ostensibly inside some of them.

But that attitude is not possible to assume with the current BM show, which is shoddy, even tacky in its installation (with some information plaques looking like signage in a pound-, or dime-store), unbeautiful, unscholarly, and in some ways no better than propaganda for the current Saudi régime. In fact, I am a little shocked that the BM agreed to mount this exhibition and lend its name and reputation to what is a pretty creepy enterprise. (I except from these strictures the book of the show, same title, £25, with excellent essays by Hugh Kennedy and Robert Irwin.)

It is a wholesale endorsement of the Muslim pilgrimage, the Hadjj, one of the five pillars of Islam.  Unlike the book that accompanies the show (but is not a catalogue of it), it doesn't seem to contain a word of criticism about any aspect of the Hadjj. Its sole concession to the physical dangers of having so many people in such a small piece of Saudi real estate at the same time is to mention the troubles of 1865, when Indian pilgrims seem to have transmitted cholera to Europe and the US, resulting in Thomas Cook becoming agents for the Hadjj for a year in 1866-7.

Overcrowding is a trivial issue. But overlooking the Sunni-Shi'a schism is serious. I came away from this show thinking that Islamic sectarianism is (and almost always has been) set aside completely by all pilgrims making the Hadjj. Indeed, the show's curator, Venetia Porter, told me explicitly that this is so - that both Shi'a and Sunni pilgrims perform the same rituals, and that their differences are suspended when making the Hadjj. Of course (you learn from the book, which she edited) this isn't quite true, as there have been times in history when the rulers of one of the sects (or political factions, indeed) banned members of others from making the Hadjj; and you only have to look at the internet to learn that such a ban is rumoured (untruly) every year. The exhibition glosses over the differences within Islam, and it does this on purpose, as it explicitly endorses, and is endorsed by, arms of the Saudi government and tourist authorities. The Saudis are thanked frequently and copiously in parts of the exhibition, not only for their support for the show, but for their contribution to making the Hadjj safer and less uncomfortable for participants.

Worse, sparse though the exhibits are, the information supplied is not good or plentiful. You have to peer closely at some of the wall captions to learn the date of the object on which it comments. Perhaps this is because a good deal of what is displayed is recent or even new. There is not much "art" included anyway - most of it illuminated manuscript pages, a few ceramic tiles, some porcelain and several textiles - and not all of the first rank. Even the exhibition design is poor. Given that one physical setting of the Hajj is an arena with the Ka'ba - a black monolithic-looking building supposedly rebuilt by Abraham and Ishmael - which pilgrims circle seven times, you would have thought the circular Reading Room was the ideal venue for this show. Though there is half a black rectangular-solid structure in its middle, the design singularly fails to cash in on the idea of circumambulation.

So what about the Hadjj itself? I speak from the vantage point of one of Sir Jonathan Miller's pious atheists, but this exhibition does no favours to Islam. Hadjj is required of any believer who has the means and opportunity to go to Mecca at the appropriate time of year. In fact, everything from the size of the 49 pebbles used to stone the pillars representing the devil to the seamlessness of the two white male garments is ritually prescribed in detail. Even today the pilgrimage is costly, arduous, uncomfortable and occasionally dangerous. Pilgrims undertake it, if not solely, then chiefly because of the promised reward of Paradise for doing so. If so many millions find it so easy to believe in Paradise gained by following sometimes physically gruelling rituals that have grisly aspects including animal sacrifice, is it not easy to understand why a few hundred of them might regard favourably killing people they see as enemies? Mightn't it be easy to persuade such people that assassination can be a shortcut to Paradise?

The best thing about this exhibition is the large amount of new work collected or commissioned for it from living artists. I'm afraid, though, the experience of seeing this mess is best summed-up in its final vitrine, a showcase of up-to-the-minute souvenir tat of the Hadjj.  I'd recommend staying at home and reading The Satanic Verses. Should this great international institution, the British Museum, really be hosting this feel-good exhibition? 

To be a member of the Critics' Circle in Britain you have to have been a regularly published critic of the theatre, music, dance, cinema or visual arts for at least two years. It's a handy form of accreditation and, unlike the way theatre and film people and musicians are organized, it has no aspect of trade unionism, and so is non-political and uncontroversial - for the most part.

         In addition to the Critics' Circle overall annual award to a practitioner of one of the arts, some of the five sections listed above give their own awards. Yesterday was the grandest occasion, the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for 2011.  The Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End was crammed with faces familiar from screens as well as from behind the footlights, as so many starry British film and television actors now seem to relish doing live theatre.

Eddie Redmayne at Awards Ceremony 24 January 2012

There were the stars of the Best New Play ("One Man. Two Guv'nors" in Richard Bean's cosmically funny take on Goldoni) including James Corden, Eddie Redmayne was there to receive a medal for his "Richard II", Sheridan Smith won best actress for "Flare Path" and only Benedict Cumberbatch was notably absent, filming in Canada. Danny Boyle collected his gong.

         Glamorous though it was, there was something worrying when the chairman of the drama section, Mark Shenton, read out - before each award - the names of those (or some of those?) also nominated for the award. Sometimes the list was so lengthy that you had to suspect that almost every eligible critic had nominated someone different. That in itself is fine and healthy. But what bothered me was that there is only one round of voting; so some of the award winners must have had only a handful of critics voting for them - or even only two or three.

         Unlike most of my colleagues (though I know of at least one who is in a similar position) I am - how to put this delicately?- not a full-time theatre critic. In my day job, freelancing as the culture critic for The Wall Street Journal Europe and for the online wsj.com, I review all the performing arts, especially theatre and opera, and also the visual arts. I have done this job since the 1990s, and I believe I have the distinction of being the only critic in the country who is a member of three sections of the Critics' Circle - drama, music and visual arts.

         In short, I cannot possibly get to see every new theatre production. Even so, I see so many every year that, when voting for awards comes around in late winter, I have trouble remembering what I have seen, and which of those productions is eligible. At yesterday's awards a colleague who sees a play almost every night of the week confessed to me that he had the same problem.

         It's a strength of the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards, and one of the features that makes them so valuable to their recipients, that there's only the single secret vote, no long list, no shortlist,  - so no horse-trading or even campaigning is possible.

         But now I'm beginning to feel that the system needs a tiny reform. Would it really make any difference to the cachet of the awards if, before voting, we were simply given a list of productions and people eligible for the awards? I can see that that means a lot of work for someone, but as the sponsor, the firm of London showbiz accountants, Nyman Libson Paul, is so generous in the provision of food and drink, I wonder whether they wouldn't be prepared to put up a small fee for someone to do the necessary research?

         That won't solve my other problem, that I failed to see several of the award-winning productions and performances - but that's a reflection of when space is available in the paper, and sometimes merely of my poor predictive powers. I'm very glad indeed that my colleagues gave the Most Promising Playwright and Most Promising Newcomer to people I didn't know, respectively Tom Wells and Blanche McIntyre, both working in London's fringe theatre. This is exactly as it should be.

 "We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people."

Who said that? The wisest man in Britain today, Iain Duncan Smith, once caretaker leader of the Conservative Party, Work and Pensions Secretary in the current government. He chairs the cabinet social justice committee, and what he has to say about the summer urban riots is full of good sense.

         In an interview with the Guardian of 9 December Duncan Smith had the guts to blame the riots on celebrity culture. Children, he said, are regarding contestants on the degraded TV programme The X Factor and doltish Premier League footballers as role models. His point is simple and obviously true: British kids think success in life is achieved by being one of these undereducated yahoos, rather than by hard work. "Kids," he said, are meant to believe that their stepping stone to massive money is The X Factor. Luck is great, but most of life is hard work. We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work."

         There's something in common - besides lack of taste - between the talentless who win The X Factor and the banksters with their undeserved giant bonuses, namely being rewarded incommensurately for the amount of skill and work involved in the performance.

         Because the people this young social-media-alerted mob are emulating haven't themselves done any genuine work to own these trophies, the rabble feel a sense of entitlement themselves. They want these baubles, and they want them now. During the riots safety of the crowd was all that was required to get them.

         This is a pessimistic view, of course. The world is in recession. We middle class wage-earners can't really afford to educate other people's kids as they deserve to be educated. But if we don't, we will have a generation where the majority is unlettered, enumerate, amoral and so lacking in taste that our institutions of high culture will find their audiences shrinking to the point where the museums, galleries, theatres, opera houses and concert halls will have to close their doors.

         Yes, it's frightening, and Duncan Smith sounds very like an Old Testament prophet. Speaking about the special difficulties facing boys today, he says:

         "It becomes a problem for boys in that the only male role model they do see is the deeply dysfunctional guy with sinning hubcaps that teaches them, 'All you need to succeed is guts, not qualifications'."

         There is a faint shimmer of hope. The "celeb" magazines appear to be losing circulation. Maybe one day "celebrity" will be a boo-word, and people will once again be celebrated for what they have achieved, rather than for their absence of talent, taste and moral capacity.

         (Diverting footnote: I intended to end this post "Whenever I hear the word 'celebrity' I reach for my revolver." But when I checked the quotation I thought I was parodying for the correct attribution, I discovered - from Wikipedia:

"Whenever I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my revolver."

• The actual quote is "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning!" This translates as: "Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!"
• This quote is often mistakenly attributed to leading Nazi Hermann Goering, or occasionally to Julius Streicher, a lower-ranking Nazi. This misattribution may date from the famous Frank Capra documentaries (Why We Fight) shown to American troops before shipping out.
• In fact, it is a line uttered by the character Thiemann in Act 1, Scene 1 of the play Schlageter, written by Hanns Johst. The association with Nazism is appropriate, as the play was first performed in April 1933, in honour of Hitler's birthday.
• Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitlerjugend, delivered this sentence in a public speech, circa 1938.)

Ace Clicker

I've known the Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew since the 1980s, when he accompanied me and a troupe of (mostly) French Michelin-starred chefs on our post-publication (of The Official Foodie Handbook) tour of India. Our lot included Pierre Troisgros, Michel Rostang, Alain Dutournier, Jean-André Charial, Jean Lameloise and journalists Gilles Pudlowski, Fay Maschler, Gael Greene and Craig Claiborne. But when this crew got to Goa, the local English-language newspaper heralded our arrival with the headline: "Ace Clicker in Town."

That, of course, was Pablo, then the best-known photographer in the subcontinent.

Pablo Bartholomew 

         Pablo proposed that we should make our way to where the body was. I was astonished - how were we going to get through the crowds? He asked: "do you have an Observer press card?" I had only my Observer  SmartCard, used for buying lunch at the staff canteen, but it had my photograph, and doubled as a security pass at our office. "Perfect," said Pablo, "show it to the policemen here." And indeed, we were escorted through the one million to the bier, where Pablo startled me by photographing the body and the grieving family. ("Don't worry," he said, "I know/ was at school with/are family friends" or whatever.) We made the front page - but I have to make an admission. I was too lazy or frightened to push our way backwards through the crowds to the ghat, and watched the cremation on live television from my hotel room.

         Aged only 19, Pablo won the World Press Photo Award for his 1975 series on Morphine Addicts in India. He is now having a splendid all black-&-white exhibition at a new venue in the East End of London called Fishbar. Though he is known for his documentary photographs of the less comfortable aspects of Indian life, and specially for his work with tribal people, Pablo is here showing what he called (to me) his "teen-aged diary," photographs of himself and his circle of friends mooching, smooching, smoking, dancing and being decorative, along with some of the photographs taken by his artist, critic and writer father, Richard (1926-85). Richard Bartholomew was Burmese, and escaped during WWII by walking the General Stilwell Road from Mandalay to Ledo in Upper Assam. (It sounds a great deal more romantic than it was, as I know from tales told by my own stepfather, who was stationed with the US Army on the India-Burma border.)

         Pablo's photographs are printed on a very thin material and mounted flush to the wall in an installation in the back room of the gallery. The effect is disconcertingly pleasing - though it has the commercial drawback that you can't buy the work and take it home with you. Unlike a few of his father's really stunning small, conventionally framed photographs of his family, friends and larger social circle. I am knocked out by the c. 1962 portrait of the painter, the late M.F. Husain entitled "Old Delhi". (Richard wrote a monograph on him published by Harry Abrams in 1972.)  This show deserves a wide audience.  Pablo is now collecting his father's work in the many forms in which Richard worked. Judging by the Fishbar show, the result will be exciting.

This question became urgent this week when my autumn roundup of performing arts events went to press on Thursday evening for Friday's paper. The "fact-checker" (I put it in scare quotes as the title is itself redundant: if something really is a fact, it obviously doesn't need checking) altered many of the dates in my piece. Why did she do this? Because she had checked the theatre websites online, and found that many if not most of them claimed that the play began before the date I had given in my copy.

         What causes the discrepancies?

         It's simple, really, but it raises a serious ethical problem.

         The theatre websites now routinely include the preview dates in their listings, and show the play's run as from the date of the first preview to the final performance (when that is known). Preview tickets are usually sold at half price, or in any case, are deeply discounted. This is an acknowledgment by the theatre management that the piece is not yet finished; that during the previews the play is still a work in progress. Previews are, in effect, dress rehearsals.

         But times are hard, and no management can afford any longer to use the preview period as a rehearsal period in which friends and families of the cast and crew are allowed in for free. Moreover, having these paid previews gives the company a chance to rehearse while actually generating revenue

         But rehearse they do. Managements are ferocious about not letting us critics see the work until the official press night, which is almost always coincident with the official opening night. At that time tickets are charged as full price, and the management, cast and crew are collectively saying: "We're ready to be seen and judged on our merits."

         Every critic knows of a case where a management has bent the rules for a colleague, and allowed him in a day early so as to catch his deadline (it's happened to me more than once). And everyone knows a case where the show has changed crucially between the last preview and the press night, and improved so substantially that the preview-going critic in effect saw a different production from the rest of us. I don't think I'd be giving away any secrets in saying that this happened very recently in the case of a musical that arrived in London from New York, but with all but two of the cast changed.

         And I have just heard today on BBC Radio 4 a broadcast featuring Blake Morrison talking about his forthcoming play "We Are Three Sisters," which combines the Brontes and Chekhov.  My old colleague Blake concurred with the Bronte specialist who was talking to him that the play had altered direction in rehearsal. I don't know at what stage of rehearsals, and don't imagine it was during the paid previews - but of course this can happen.

         That is why, when writing a signed piece telling readers of my newspaper what plays (and operas - though the question doesn't arise, as there are no opera previews) I think they might like to buy tickets for this autumn, I insist that we do not include the paid preview dates, and give the run as beginning on the official first or press night.  If the theatre does not want me to see a performance because it's not yet ready, it would be wrong of me to recommend that my readers pay (even if it's half-price) to see what is only a work in progress, and not yet the finished piece.

         Don't you agree?

         But I want to note a few things about Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) - while I can still remember the broad outlines, as I've already forgotten many of the details. In about 1969, the late Alix Strachey (Mrs James Strachey, 1892-1973), engaged me to edit the letters between her late husband, James, Lytton's youngest brother, a psychoanalyst who was the editor of the Standard Edition of the Works of Freud, and Rupert Brooke. I subsequently got permission from the Brooke Trust, Rupert's copyright holder, or at least from the man who ran it, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, the younger brother of Maynard Keynes, who was a distinguished surgeon and bibliophile. When Sir Geoffrey gave me his blessing, I suspected that he did not know of the existence of one long letter, which was in the Berg Collection  of the New York Public Library. This contained a graphic account of Rupert losing his virginity, to another boy - not James (1887-1967), though James Strachey was, at that time, both gay and desperately in love with Rupert. On this occasion, at least, Rupert was taking James into his confidence, but not into his bed.

         I'm afraid I no longer remember what Mrs Strachey (who was homophile - a word we can surely use if we allow the expression "homophobe") told me about whether James and Rupert had had a sexual relationship. I incline to thinking they did, but can no longer remember enough about the circumstances to produce any evidence.

         Despite the offer of a £25,000 advance from Jonathan Cape - in the 70s, when this was real money - I gave up the project of editing the Rupert/James correspondence (I happily handed the job over to Keith Hale, Yale University Press, 1998), mostly because I was bored with Bloomsbury, too lazy to do the further research needed, and demoralized by the pirating of the crucial letter in the late 80s in a book about Brooke and his friends.

         I did do a little of the preliminary research. For example, I had a drink with the splendid actress, Cathleen Nesbitt (b.1888), in her Kensington flat, a year of two before her death in 1982. She told me that the Rupert she knew from 1912, was sexually confused and that, though they considered themselves engaged to be married, never had sexual relations. She knew he was, at the least, bisexual; but his concern at the time was very definitely heterosexual. He'd got Ka Cox pregnant (Katherine Laird Cox, 1887-1938; in 1918 she married Will Arnold-Forster). Ms Nesbitt told me Ka had had an "abortion," but I'm fairly sure she meant a spontaneous abortion, a miscarriage. Rupert was tied in knots about this. He'd finally succeeded in having sex with a woman, but a child was not a cheerful prospect. He fancied himself in love with Ka, but then also with Nesbitt; and in March, 2000, the British Library release a cache of letters that showed he was simultaneously having an 18-month affair with an art student, Phyllis Gardner, whom he finally dumped in 1913. In 1914 he made another woman pregnant in Tahiti - she was named Taatamata, and is reported to have had a child by Rupert.

         And then there was Noël Olivier (1893-1969). When Rupert (and James Strachey) met her in 1903, she was still a schoolgirl at Bedales. I believe Rupert was "engaged" to her as well when he died in April, 1915, of septicemia from a mosquito or fly bite. (Rupert never saw an action at all. His battle-hungry post-mortem reputation was puffed by his very gay patron Eddie Marsh, in cahoots with his own boss, Winston Churchill - who wrote the Times obituary that made Rupert famous.)

         The Hon. Noël Olivier was one of the four daughters of the first Lord Olivier (Noël's daughter told me that Laurence Olivier had to ask his cousins' permission to take the title), and became a medical doctor. At one point, Rupert thought himself in love with to or three of the Olivier girls. James and Noël comforted each other when Rupert died, and were a bit in love, though James then considered himself exclusively homosexual - encouraged in this by big brother Lytton, who thought that the more natural state - and certainly it was the more prevalent sexuality in that stage of the Bloomsbury Group.

         But then in 1920, James and Noël each married someone else. Noël married another doctor, William Arthur Richards; and James married the American-born Alix Sargant-Florence, and the pair went to Vienna for a couple of years, to be analysed by Freud himself (and became his translators). I was told, though, that James and Noël resumed their affair sometime after they married, and that it continued until James died in 1967.

         There of course needs to be a biography of James, who was also an outstanding musicologist, and contributed the original programme noted to Glyndebourne. Michael Holroyd and I were appointed (by Alix Strachey) the literary executors for James' non-psychoanalytic copyrights (along with Lytton's and her own), but I don't think either of us is going to get around to do doing this; and I am certain that at least some of those psychoanalysts who study James Strachey are ill-qualified to write his life. A pity.

         I'm not confident that any of this sheds new light on the diverting enigmas contained in Alan Hollinghurst's book, but it might provide some moderately entertaining footnotes to those writing dissertations on various subjects - and I thought I ought to write down the little I know and remember.

Only moments ago, watching the ITV News account of the tsunami resulting from the earthquake in NE Japan, I heard the announcer say that low-lying Pacific Islands were menaced - and that for many of them this was a double blow, as some of them had previously had to be evacuated owing to the consequences of global warming. It strikes me as odd - and interesting - that the TV news presenter can refer to climate change in a commonsensical, low-key way, while some global warming-deniers are still shouting from the (metaphorical) rooftops, and while there have been two plays in London recently struggling to deal with the climate change question: i.e., whether it is man-made, as no one can actually deny the fact of climate change.

         How odd it is for anyone to be undecided about this question, and still odder to be a denier. This attitude is more or less shared by the first of the two plays, "Greenland." When I reviewed it in the Wall Street Journal, I said:

With a new play, "Greenland," the National Theatre has a rare misfire on its large Lyttelton stage. The work, a big-hearted attempt to dramatize the real problems of climate change and global warming, credits four playwrights, of whom the best-known is the usually tack-sharp Moira Buffini. The director is the promising young British-Iranian, Bijan Sheibani; the design side, led by Bunny Christie (who won the CC designer award for "The White Guard") is imaginative; and there are some lovely performances.

"Greenland" is a collection of vignettes ranging in their setting from protest camps to the Arctic, and there are some good moments from a lesbian couple talking to their therapist, to a perfect pantomime polar bear nuzzling a young man who is very under-dressed for Alaska. A play of sorts does emerge from these scenes, but what's lacking is some observance of the good old-fashioned, neo-Aristotelian respect for the dramatic unities.

         "The Heretic" by the acerbic and witty playwright, Richard Bean, at the Royal Court Theatre, has the advantages of a real star, Juliet Stevenson, as Dr. Diane Cassell (motto: "I'm a Scientist. I don't believe in anything") and a lovely performance by a young actor, Johnny Flynn, as Ben Shotter, Diane's daughter's right-on (but capable of thought despite his commitment and a hint of autism).

         Ms Stevenson's character is the heretic of the title. She's a climatologist who is not convinced about anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, she doesn't believe the Maldives are sinking; that the sea levels there have not risen in the last 20 years.  The idea is that Mr. Bean's "black comedy" questions whether the question is actually settled, or (to quote the Royal Court's website): "Could the belief in anthropogenic global warming be the most attractive religion of the 21st century?"

         The play is full of zippy one-liners, and the laughs keep it buoyant. Mr. Bean does succeed in making the argument personal, so that we care about the victimization of Diane Cassell - and thus there's some genuine drama. "The Heretic" a good deal more fun than "Greenland," even if its heart is in the wrong place.

         The real trouble with "The Heretic" is, however, shown by the ITV news reporter: the question is, for all practical purposes, settled, and Mr. Bean is simply keeping company with the Flat Earthers.

The exhibition called "Modern British Sculpture" that opened at the Royal Academy today (until 7 April) is a fraud.

         It's one of those shows intended to illustrate a theory or make an argument. Its publicity claims: "the exhibition takes a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions that challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions [my emphasis]." The trouble is that the "new connections" are so desperately old hat.

         OK, room 2, "Theft by Finding" has lots of lovely African, Native American, Mexican and Etruscan objects, such as we expect to find in the British Museum and the V& A. You mean Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, F.E. Mc William and Leon Underwood were influenced by seeing these artifacts? Well I never! You could knock me over with a feather.

         And that there's something in common between Carl André and Richard Long? Or between Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst? No! You astonish me. There is no reason whatever for André's installation and Koons's (now tatty-looking) piece to be represented in this show, except fatuity and fashion (last year's, at that).

         You can see why, at one of the many private views of this appalling show, an eminent, older British artist told me how worried he was that the co-curator, Penelope Curtis's day job is as the new Director of Tate Britain.

         I can see why he's nervous. We all accept that this exhibition is not a "traditional survey" (though could someone please remind me when was the last traditional survey of modern British sculpture on the scale of this show?). But look at this on page 16 of Dr. Curtis's heavyweight catalogue. She is writing abut Henry Moore's world-wide celebrity and international demand for his work following his success at the 1948 Venice Biennale: "A pattern established through the demand for Moore was continued in the 1950s and 1960s with Reg Butler, Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick..." According to her index, this is the only mention of these three major British sculptors in the entire 316-page volume; and there is not a single work by any of them in her show.

         I knew Armitage slightly and, to disclose an irrelevant interest, Lynn Chadwick and I were close friends in the 1970s. Speaking sub specie aeternitatis, it would have added a good deal more to the sum of human knowledge (and possibly even to human enjoyment) if the RA had mounted a large retrospective/survey of those three artists, or of British sculpture of the 60s-80s, including a good deal more of the early work of Barry Flanagan (of which there is one strong, but unrepresentative piece in this feeble show).

         Just to remind younger - or unfamiliar readers: Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) came first to public attention when he was commissioned to make three works for the Festival of Britain (1951), and was one of the sculptors characterised by Herbert Read as evoking the "geometry of fear." He showed to great acclaim at the Venice Biennale of 1952 and in 1956 won the Biennale International Prize for Sculpture, beating Alberto Giacometti.  Though the British art establishment reacted to this British triumph by neglecting him from the 1970s until he died, his work continued to sell well, especially abroad. A couple of years ago a piece of his broke the £1million barrier. There is a retrospective of his work on the theme of "Couples" recently opened at the Pangolin Gallery in King's Cross. I understand that one of the pieces in it has a £1m price tag. I wish I owned one of the "Beasts," the near-abstract lion/dog/wolf-like creatures cast in bronze that prompted Read's brilliant description.

  He made a permanent mark on English literature as editor of the Times Literary Supplement when he took over from Arthur Crook in 1974, simply by ending the practice of anonymity. At a stroke he banished "Mr Puff and Mr Sneer" from his pages, and made the paper lively, which it has been ever since, but never was before. Though he knew his own mind, John's manner was diffident, and he would never have claimed or appealed to the higher morality for his policy; but, in fact, he brought fairness to an institution that had provided a cordial, even sometimes welcoming home to the vendetta and the literary assassin.

         By the summer of 1978 I had completed writing and (with a genius called Venetia Pollock) the long, painful process of editing my book on G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, which had long been contracted to Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a publishing house with which John had a long-time, mostly informal association. I can't remember where John and I met (though most probably it was via his then-wife, the stunningly beautiful, wonderfully clever, Miriam, Terry Kilmartin's deputy literary editor on The Observer, for whom I'd been reviewing since 1974). Our social circles overlapped even more after he and Miriam separated, and even now I smile at remembering the bevy of well-born, nicely brought-up young beauties who seemed to surround John at parties. He beamed with pleasure at their company.

I knew a secret. John was an Apostle. He'd been elected during his time as a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, from 1962-65. This is further testimony to his intellectual splendour, for it was unusual for the Apostles to elect men who were fellows, or as old as John (who was born in 1935).  The Apostles of his day met, I believe, in Morgan Forster's set of rooms at King's. (Somewhere I have a membership list of the Apostles that stretches well into John's time at King's, but in the chaos of my office I can find the list only up to 1914.)

         The reason I mentioned the summer of 1978 above is that it was the occasion when John commissioned my first piece for the TLS. This commission showed the breadth both of his imagination and of his reading. It was to review a volume called The Poems of John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Though I had read some Dewey when I was reading philosophy as an undergraduate, I had no special qualification for reviewing this book - or so I thought, until I began to do some research.

         Though I wrote that: "The book itself, except for the seventy-odd pages that contain the text of the verse, has been subjected to [the] academic kiss of death and is virtually unreadable," I continued:

         "Yet Dr Boydston's work is redeemed by her discovery (related largely in her footnotes and in the blurb on the dust-jacket) that Dewey had 'a brief emotional involvement...in the 1917-18 period' with the Jewish Polish-American writer, Anzia Yezierska, who is the subject of much of his love poetry. Nothing could do more to rehabilitate John Dewey than this revelation that he was, after all, human; that in spite of the volumes of lifeless, unlovely prose published in his lifetime and after, the bloodless philosophical writing that is intelligible now only to his few remaining disciples, Dewey was capable of great passion."

         The first point is how remarkable it was that John knew of Yezierska; he even directed me to a photograph of her in Irving Howe's World of our Fathers. The second that he sent me to the London Library, where he knew the then-Librarian could help me find out more about her. Third: if only any editor would allow me to write a paragraph as complicated as that, or the TLS would allow me now to write at the length of my first-ever piece for that paper. For all his diffidence, John knew exactly what he was doing. He'd matched this crazy volume of verse by a dusty philosopher with an ex-philosopher whose real qualification was that, once he'd discovered it, he would understand the immigrant background of Dewey's unexpected mistress and its significance for both of them. And (despite, or maybe because of, my own PhD in English) I think he probably expected me to be repulsed by the pseudo-scholarship of the book.

      When John was on the TLS he showed, too, the catholicity of his interests.  I once got a call from him asking if I knew the owner of a gallery well enough for him to ask to reproduce an image from a current show. I told John (accurately, it turned out) that both the gallery and the artist would be thrilled to be asked. He came to stay with us in the country once or twice. I wasn't terribly surprised to learn that he knew our nearest neighbours very well - he knew everybody.

In the 90s we met frequently, sometimes more than once a week, as he was the theatre critic for The Sunday Telegraph and I was made to add the theatre to my critical portfolio on The Wall Street Journal. John was as brilliant a theatre critic as he was a book reviewer, with a huge memory bank of performances - and texts - to draw on.

I only wish we'd seen more of one another since he retired. John enriched the lives of a lot of people. We were lucky to have known him, and I'll miss him.

I made a huge gaffe once, by saying to someone who was probably an old girlfriend of his that I had assumed he was gay. One of the small felicities of his autobiography is the straightforward way that he confirms my first impression: my blushes could have been spared if I'd known then any of this boyfriends who were later to be members of Mrs Thatcher's cabinet.

My prejudice against him, which grew over his stand on the Iraq war, was wrong. Hitch is a hero. He has cheerfully faced down adversity, shown quiet courage (the best kind), and blown a cerebral raspberry to the god-bothering brigade who anticipate a death-fearing conversion to their childish theism. I wish him well, and I wish I'd always done so, as his example teaches me more about living a worthwhile life than (to quote Lytton Strachey) Mr Jehovah, Mr Jesus or any of their prophets or disciples.

         What else have I been wrong about? Well not about Lord Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies (or, as we still think of it, despite his rewrite, Paint Never Dries). It was too feeble to go to Broadway, and though I haven't seen it again (and don't plan to, thanks) I'd be very surprised if it crosses the Atlantic even wearing its new clothes. Is it the worst thing I've seen all year? Probably.

         One of the best, though unreviewed by me in the day job, was English National Opera's A Dog's Heart by the Russian composer Rastakov - though the real point of it was the raucously imaginative expressionist staging by Complicité, complete with puppets and multiple voices playing the title role. My Russianist goddaughter tells me that Mazzonis' libretto is fairly true to the original tale by Bulgakov. Director Simon McBurney's production had the good or ill fortune to be reviewed by a lot of non-specialists who were rude about the music. Unfairly, I thought, as the score was full of quotations that added greatly to the fun, and was not as difficult to listen to as one or two of my theatre-critic colleagues insisted. You have to wonder whether a production as expensive as this, with its big band, huge cast and elaborate sets can be revived. You have to hope so. Was this the ENO's best effort in 2010? Yes, probably, though I enjoyed the new Pearlfishers a good deal more than most of my colleagues, and was one of the few critics who really liked Rufus Norris' Don Giovanni. I note that Jonathan Miller's production of The Mikado will celebrate its 25^th anniversary at ENO on February 26. As I have an anniversary of my own that day, I probably won't be there to applaud Sir Jonathan; but don't you think it might have been appropriate to mark this milestone by commissioning the great man to direct another production? After all, this, and his La bohème and Rigoletto have kept the house solvent through many a year.

It's been a good while since I've posted, chiefly because limited mobility has made it difficult to get to London and take part in the capital's cultural life. It seems that I need a new knee. I wish I could say that I wore out the old one by exercising it too much, by marathon-running or even ballroom dancing. But of course, however exquisite, these would be fibs. The truth is that the absence of cartilage in my right knee is the result of a car crash I had in 1957. Not only was I the bad driver, but the parents' car I totaled was a design icon, a 1951 Raymond Loewy Studebaker. 

Childhood friends will remember that I spent about 10 months in hospital conditions, and that my leg was only saved because clever surgeons performed a then-radical operation attaching a metal plate with four screws to what was left of my shattered femur. I might have hoped that, five or six years later, when I was called up to be conscripted into the US Army, this injury would make me ineligible. But no, the Army surgery protocol said that the only remedy for injuries like mine was amputation. I had a leg; ergo I could not have sustained the injuries described in my medical records. QED (it was very radical surgery).

         Fortunately, a sympathetic medical examiner (who happened to be the father of schoolfriends, and a mate of the surgeons in question) discovered evidence of asthma in the same records (though I don't think I've ever had an asthma attack), and I was exempted from being drafted into the 101^st Airborne Division, which marshaled at Fort Campbell, KY, and was then sent to Vietnam.  This also prevented me from facing a moral crisis, because I was probably the only kid in Kentucky then who knew about the "police action" in Vietnam, and I was so opposed to it that I might well have refused to go.

         This is an awfully long-winded way of saying that the reason I am on crutches for the rest of the month is that my current young Oxford surgeon insisted on removing the souvenir metal plate before doing the new knee. He allowed me to see the trophy as I was recovering from the anaesthetic, and I deeply regret that I wasn't allowed to keep the beautiful sculptural object, which was not only unrusted, but even shiny despite its 53 years' attachment to my person. (In Britain such objects have to be incinerated - something to do with the prions that are suspected to cause BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and the fact that nobody yet knows what a prion is and how it behaves.)

         During these weeks I've managed to get to the theatre and opera very occasionally, and to a gallery or two; but mostly I've caught up on my reading. I had the time to read most of the longlist for the Man Booker prize. And though I was wrong about the winner (I plumped for Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, not because I was second-guessing the judges, but because I thought it the best book on the shortlist), Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question is, as I said in my preview piece in the Wall Street Journal, a reflective and touching book.

         I've also read the letters of my friend the late Bruce Chatwin, Under the Sun, edited by his widow, Elizabeth and his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare. If you happen to read the notes to p.269, about Bruce meeting, at a wedding in June, 1977, a 27-year-old Australian stockbroker called Donald Richards - with whom he was infatuated if not in love for the next five years - it was my wedding party. At least three of the guests, including Donald and Bruce, died of Aids - a very grisly memory of an otherwise happy and memorably funny occasion. Many of the reviewers of Bruce's "letters" have remarked that Bruce's literary reputation is in decline. Is that true? Do young people no longer buy his books? In my own memory there are stacks of them, in paperback translations, in bookshops in Spain, France and Italy. How I wish I'd bought a copy of each.

         The diaries of Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire , Wait for Me!, has also been beside my bed. It's prefaced by a "Note on Family Names," which glosses the nicknames the Mitfords used for each other - and it's as hard to follow as the cast of characters of War and Peace. I love Debo's wide-eyed innocence about her intimacy with the Kennedy family, and the proximity to powerful people of her and her sisters. My best friend at Harvard was her husband's cousin, and he socialized with the Kennedys as well; but we thought nothing of it then - I suppose most of my friends at Harvard were only one or two degrees removed from the Kennedys. But Unity, Diana and Hitler! There's a social set with a difference.

         To be published in  few days, What Makes a Masterpiece: Encounters with Great Works of Art, edited by Christopher Dell (Thames & Hudson £24.95) is a perfect counterweight to Neil MacGregor's just-ending BBC Radio 4 series, A History of the World in 100 Objects.

        This is the greatest use of radio ever - including the celebrated broadcasts during WWII, or the 1950s soap operas, the quiz programmes of later decades and even Desert Island Discs. MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, has described 100 objects in the BM, got guest speakers to comment on their significance, and simply held every educated person in the country spellbound for several months, despite not being able to see what he was talking about. Stupendous. In the handsome Masterpiece volume, seventy well-chosen writers (some of them artist themselves) justify their choice of a work of art in a few hundred words. Tom Phillips chooses "The Mycerinus Triad," Marina Warner Bernini's "The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa." If asked, I'd have chosen a painting by Howard Hodgkin. Come to think of it, why wasn't Hodgkin asked to choose a work himself?

The scale of the show is just right, about sixty paintings, I'd guess. They range in size from the tiny, 25.1 x 28.9cm, Leaf (2007-2009), what appears to be a single swooping stroke of a large brush loaded with a particularly appealing green paint - a painting you fall in love with at first sight - to the four enormous Home, Home on the Range series. The Oxford show may be the only opportunity we get to see all four of these hanging side by side in a big room filled with natural light, so I urge you to see the show. But it seems to me that these extraordinary masterpieces ought really to be treated in one respect like the Rothko murals. Surely Tate Modern (or a similar institution) ought to own (and exhibit) them together?

The first two, Home, Home on the Range and Where the Deer and the Antelope Play, are dated 2001-2007, and are lusciously colourful, the first with highly saturated oranges and reds, the second still bright, but dominated by the outer bands of dark blue and brown found near the centre of the first picture. Are they meditations on the American landscape? Why not. But what strikes you first is the depth of both images: the eye is strongly drawn into the centre of the picture plane, which in both cases seems to recede. Hodgkin has a real genius for suggesting depth and perception with what appear to be (but of course, aren't) simple swipes of paint. He's always been able to capture the feeling of looking out of (or into) a window, onto a landscape, a garden or into another room, or looking at a stage.  This pair of pictures invites you to stare at them, and when you've peered closely at them for long enough, to discern some natural features of landscape - seen, perhaps, from the window of a moving train or car.

Or maybe not. Maybe they're the correlatives of states of feeling - maybe the hot reds and oranges of the first recall the excitements of sexual attraction. Or not. But whatever these pictures are, they are not abstract. You don't have to analyse them to know this - you can tell from your own response to them, the quickening of the pulse, the sensation of having your gaze pulled into the centre  - in brief, the tugging at the heartstrings, that something is going on that ain't geometry.

It isn't surprising that the latter two paintings of the series Where Seldom is Heard a Discouraging Word and And the Skies are not Cloudy All Day are dates 2007-2008; or that both leave areas of the wood support unpainted. Both achieve the transparency, the clarity that Hodgkin has said he is striving for, as he gets older. In Where Seldom... I at first thought I could detect the direction of the brushwork moving from right to left, and maybe that is so for the thick lines of blue and grey near the centre, above the curved orange and yellow forms at the bottom of the panel. But looking at the surface really closely I can see that that is not possible, and that, indeed some of the strokes must be going from left to right. I still sense horizontal movement; but now I am inclined to see the human form in the huge orange and yellow gestures - though I could easily be persuaded to read the whole image as landscape. But it's a happy picture, of that I'm sure. Though it might have had some menace in it, if the navy blues got any blacker. Again, there is no need to cogitate to "get" this picture - your visceral reaction is all the authorization you need for liking (or disliking) it.

Then we come to And the Skies are not... where it appears that less than half the surface of the wood is painted with odd, anarchic-seeming marks of the same shade of green. This is a huge picture, 2 metres by 2.67 metres, and the skies aren't cloudy because they're summer's lush green - no clouds, but maybe the green of the quality of mercy that droppeth like the rain. What is actually surprising about this image that is achieved by such minimal means is that you couldn't mistake its author.

Hodgkin is the artist of memory. Whereas his earlier work was intimist, recalling particular moments in time and place, but usually in interiors, or with particular people in interiors or landscapes, often their own gardens, the recent work has broadened its scope and simplified its means. Hodgkin has spoken of his wish to get rid of clutter, his aspirations to clarity and transparency. The catalogue of this show is very worth buying. Though Sam Smiles' essay has some of the lexical opacity of academic work, he is actually being precise rather than obfuscatory. You'll want the catalogue for its illustrations, and for the illustrated "reader" at the back of it, put together by Antony Peattie and by Paul Luckcraft who helped put the show together for MAO. It is "a survey of critical responses, 1962-2009" with representative images. From it and the illustrations of the newer work, you will see that it is almost impossible to fail to recognize a Hodgkin, and utterly impossible to mistake anyone else's work for his. This is indisputably the hallmark of the Master, the gift given to those few artists who make their mark on history. If anybody remembers me in a hundred years' time, it will be because Howard has twice painted me; these images will certainly outlive any other evidence of my existence. What happy immortality.

Writing about food, eating and drinking - as distinct from how-to cookery manuals - goes back at least to antiquity, from Juvenal's biting Satires and Petronius's detailing of the excesses of Trimalchio's feast, to the dietary prohibitions of the Old Testament. It would be both interesting and a little tedious to trace food writing through the ages; however, there has always been a self-consciously literary tradition, as in Petronius's mocking exaggerations of a decadent Roman cena. In the hands of really good writers, as we've seen in our own time in the work of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, even collections of recipes can have literary worth - though this is exceptional, and most writers of recipes do not have literary pretensions, or even ambitions.

         Something new is happening, though. Julie Powell's Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, which had its origins online in a blog, has turned into a movie with a magnificent role for Meryl Streep. One of the effects of this has been to make high-end food a subject for mainstream entertainment - as it has been for 25 years anyway for affluent urbanites, for whom eating out is a major leisure activity (as Social Trends reported yet again in 2006), and cooking a hobby. But perhaps the correct way to view this is as the crest of a foodie wave, in which people are thinking and writing about food in all sorts of novel ways.

A fresh literary genre has appeared recently - food writing as therapy. We're used to the idea of food itself as therapeutic; that is what accounts for the ease with which a book advocating a new slimming diet finds itself on the best-seller list. Sometimes diet books claim to make you cleverer, sexier, more productive or even happier, and there have been plenty of memoirs by cooks who find some sort of serenity at their stoves.   But these new books aren't exactly about food, or even cooking or eating, but about the comfort writing about food brings. For example, Kim Severson, now a food writer on the New York Times, has just published Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Levy-t.html not a Julie/Julia, but profiles of eight female cooks interspersed with misery-memoir, confessional musings about her recovery from alcoholism and coming to (happy) terms with her lesbianism. She does sometimes cook recipes garnered from her heroines. But that's not what makes her better; what does that is the sycophancy-tinged interviews she conducts with them, and the career she builds upon these. 

Matt McAllester was a foreign correspondent for Newsday, known as a war reporter, imprisoned for a week in Iraq in 2003, and for his previous books about his time in Kosovo and Iraq.  Bittersweet: Lessons from My Mother's Kitchen (Bloomsbury  £16.99) is not the book you'd expect from a man who writes: "A year later I was back in Baghdad, sitting in my hotel room one afternoon, when a bullet ricocheted around my balcony." That was in 2005, and the result of the rifle shot was to persuade McAllester to propose marriage to his girlfriend when he returned to London in February. All in all, he seems an unlikely person to be writing a book about how he learned to cook.  But he had two crucial connections with food. The first was his father, the well-known advertising photographer, Don McAllester, who took the photographs that illustrated many of Jane Grigson's cookery columns in the Observer Magazine, and who presumably took the lovely, though uncredited family photographs that are one of the joys of Bittersweet. The other link with food is the writer's mother, Ann, who told him, "If you want to know how to cook, read Elizabeth David. She'll tell you everything. Read French Provincial Cooking. Her books are marvelous. We all learned to cook from Elizabeth David." This conversation took place on May 4^th, 2005, at his mother's nursing home in Swiss Cottage, where she died, unexpectedly, of a heart attack two days later, leaving a good deal of unfinished emotional business for her son.

During that last visit his mother had asked him if he thought he was a good cook, and he answered that he thought he was "not bad." She then asked if he always left the cookery book open, so as to be able to consult the recipe while doing the cooking, and he admitted he did. "Then," she concluded, "you can't cook....If you need to keep the book open, you're not really cooking."  They had had these "companion" conversations many times before. His mother's behaviour had for many years been unpredictable, except that it was likely to be bad and embarrassing, and her appearance went from the chic woman we see in the book's illustrations to a raggedy bag lady.

Ann McAllester was alcoholic and bipolar, and it appears that the diagnosis of the latter condition came too late to treat it and save her marriage, or her relationships with her children, who had enjoyed an idyllic childhood living with their near-bohemian parents in London and Edinburgh, with holidays on the west coast of Scotland at Port an Droighionn, first in a caravan, and then in a Norwegian-designed log house they built overlooking the bay. The first cracks in the façade of family happiness appeared when he rebelled at his ambiguously religious mother's attempts to send him to a Catholic boarding school. (His mutiny took him to live and work in America, and finally to report from some of this century's most dangerous places.) Though he never really had a faith to lose, there were times during and after his mother's final illness when he derived some comfort simply from being in the beautiful, socially smart Jesuit Church at Farm Street, Mayfair. But he recognized he was there, trying "to bluff my way past my own dogged atheism," not just to conjure up happier memories of his mother, but also to try to influence the God whom he didn't believe in to help his wife conceive by IVF the child they longed for. Though he sometimes appealed to an image of the Virgin, Our Lady of Lourdes, at the Farm Street Church of the Immaculate Conception, what he really sought was the intercession of St Elizabeth David.

Even as a child McAllester was most in touch with his mother when they were cooking together. His grief took the strange form of trying to learn to cook as well as his mother did. On the first anniversary of her death and cremation, "I had no grave to visit so in the afternoon I went to the Waitrose on Finchley Road." But the chief thing was to get over the open-cookbook hurdle: "My form of cooking and shopping was inseparable from words on the page." Eventually McAllester does learn to internalize recipes, and approach cooking analytically - and learns from his aunts that, whatever his mother preached, she always kept the book open while cooking. By three years after Ann's death, his own "goal to memorize one hundred Elizabeth David recipes had faded away." He continues to idolize Mrs David (a bit deceived by his research in an unreliable biography of her, which he read in addition to Artemis Cooper's excellent one), and though unaware of the hard-drinking, difficult woman she became in her own old age, "I let her go. And with her, I had begun to let my mother go." Therapy complete, the patient is cured, as recounted in an elegantly written memoir. More books in this genre are already scheduled for publication; I don't expect to read another  as compelling as this one.

Religion is a difficult subject for me. I hate it - but I'm fascinated by the details of religions - liturgical, scriptural, ceremonial, even ecclesiastical - the whole lot. I feel that all religious belief is childish and weak, and I've never understood why believing you have an Imaginary Friend, and that you can pray or talk to him should make you a happier or better person.  But it's the belief part I don't get: I'm riveted by the detail of the rituals you practice to get in touch with him, and, of course, recognize the genius of the artists, musicians and architects who claim they have been inspired by him and his sacraments, rules and the disputes these have caused. For all my militancy, I'm a sort of pious atheist, as my friend Dr. Jonathan Miller says we should all be.

On the other hand, there are a few things to do with religion that I can't get worked up about; and many of these have to do with the contemporary Church of England.  The history of the CofE is, of course, one of the most interesting chapters in the history of church or state; but its current predicament, as it tears itself to pieces over whether it should have women and male homosexual priests or bishops, is hard for me to care about. It seems to me obvious that the answer is yes to women, because they are more than half the population; and yes to gays, because without them there would be very few Anglican clerics.

         Another friend, Jane Kramer, whom I suspect of having views a bit like my own, has written a completely brilliant, compelling piece in the 26 April New Yorker, "A Canterbury Tale: The battle within the Church of England to allow women to be bishops." It's a great read for a Trollope-sympathiser such as me, who loves the messy, concrete detail of the organization of the CofE, the great sweep of history that has to be rehearsed in order to grasp these details, and the wonderfully weird turn of mind of the man who runs the show, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I met him at dinner at an Oxford college once, a few weeks after his elevation. I then thought that the strangest things about him were that he wanted the job, and that he was wearing a sort of frock. On the other hand, the be-gowned dons didn't look all that dissimilar.

         So I was genuinely surprised when, the week I read Jane's piece, I also was at the press night of a very good new play, "Love the Sinner" by  Drew Pautz, at the National Theatre.   I was surprised by the Antony Powellian coincidence that both the New Yorker piece and the play were about the CofE's troubles, but even that Mr. Pautz, a Canadian associated with the great Robert LePage, should think these a suitable subject for a drama.

         Nonetheless, he's made a very good fist of it indeed. It opens with a locked-in meeting of Anglican clergymen (and woman) somewhere in Africa, grappling with the problem of homosexual priests. As in real life, the attitudes of the Africans are sickeningly unchristian, bigoted and in every possible way disgusting. As the rules say they must meet no person from outside their ranks, they have a very funny scene of keeping their eyes shut as an attractive African waiter, Joseph,  (the marvelous Fiston Barek) brings their coffee. In the next scene we see the group's lay volunteer note-taker, Michael (Jonathan Cullen), in his hotel room with Joseph, in (temporary) post-coital bliss. Michael's married, gay and a religious nut who is destroying his business by imposing his religion on his colleagues. The play works so well because the Church's tensions are embodied in and exemplified by the individual dramas; but designer Anne Fleischle ultra-flexible set helps, too. Matthew Dunster directs a superb cast, with Scott Handy especially good as the Bishop's gofer; and Charlotte Randle as the broody, wronged wife in a doomed marriage. 

         The NT is holding some discussions in late June and early July about "the church's complicated position regarding sexuality" and "the cultural responsibility of the church in a post-colonial world."  Both topics interest me a little. But I'd be more interested in a debate as to whether all the bishops should lose their sets in the House of Lords. (Yes, they sit there by right, and were not kicked out with the Hereditary Peers.) And for what it's worth, I think the so-called "Chief Rabbi" (he is actually head honcho only of the small minority of United Orthodox Jewish Congregations) should go first.

         The numbers are staggering. This is not simply a feminist issue - if the facts were more widely known it would not only help the victims of rape (and tribal, Hutu v. Tutsi, violence, and the rush for the DRC's minerals), but also help us gain some perspective on the world's other conflict hotspot. The Middle East has nothing of comparable depravity.

         The extraordinary thing is that Ms Nottage has been able to make a play of this (now at the Almeida until 5 June, www.almeida.co.uk), and an enjoyable one, too. This owes something to Robert Jones's clever revolving set, which gives us both the outside and interior of Mama Nadi's bar-brothel near a mining village in a part of the DRC. But also Nottage has created full, rounded characters, played with total conviction by a cast brimming with talent. At least three of the superb actors in this all-but-one-black company have just graduated from drama school.  The playwright and director Indhu Rubasingham have managed to stage a play that leaves you feeling that hope is not dead and pleasure is still possible, no mean feat when more than one of the characters indicates the meaning of the title. Joyfully dealing with the genuinely horrible, Jenny Jules as Mama Nadi shows star quality - and so do several others: Pippa Bennett-Warner as Sophie, the educated "ruined" girl, Michelle Asante as the married woman Salima and Kehinde Fadipe as the apparent good-time girl, Josephine. The boys are terrific, too, though some look almost too fetching in their camouflage uniforms and combat boots.

         Some of my theatre critic colleagues have complained that the upbeat ending rings false, and others have even felt that it betrays the misery and wickedness depicted in the rest of the drama. I'm not sure. I felt at the time that the wit and flashes of good humour of Nottage's dialogue showed that Mama Nadi has a soft centre missing in her obvious predecessor, Mother Courage, that makes her a bit more like the hard-bitten professional women in 1930s Hollywood Screwball comedies. It's true that the final scene is not as strong as what went before; but it's an exhilarating evening for all that.