The Learning Age

Twenty or so years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing a still-combative Richard Hoggart about the ongoing erosion of public service broadcasting in the UK, the type of broadcasting which, as he put it, took viewers and listeners ‘beyond the familiar’. We a...

A lot of ink has been spilt trying to show that William Shakespeare – the author of the 36 plays compiled in the First Folio – was someone other than the glovemaker’s son of that name born in Stratford-upon-Avon on or around 23 April 1564.

Amateur literacy sleuths have found it difficult to imagine how someone from relatively humble circumstances – certainl...

Hamlet is a play about futures and pasts. It is about a father who has only a past, who takes his son’s future away. It is about a son who wants a different future but can’t escape the violence of the past. In the end, the past wins. It destroys the future.

I saw an adaptation of the play – well, more of a comedic revision – in Stratford in the summer in wh...