I’m in the middle of a very busy time and my partner has jetlag from a conference abroad, so it took a bunch of very good reviews and word of mouth for us to give up our one free night to go and see ‘Mary Shelley’ at Nottingham Playhouse. I didn’t know Helen Edmundson‘s work and don’t have a strong interest in the Romantics,  but you don’t need to know anything about the period or the literature before going to see this terrific play. It’s absorbing and historically lucid in a manner that reminded me of Stoppard at his best. But rather than the huge cast you tend to get in Stoppard’s historical plays, this has just six actors, playing William Godwin (the excellent William Chubb,…

Most mornings these days, I have a session on my exercise bike before breakfast – gets my metabolism going, stops my knees from seizing up and lets me catch up on radio programmes or podcasts I’ve missed. I sometimes watch TV shows, but rarely first thing in the morning: it just feels wrong somehow. Yesterday’s exercise bike listen also felt wrong, as it was all about people who work in the night. Jarvis  Cocker hasn’t always been a national treasure. As a Sheffield born writer and Pulp fan, I wrote a letter defending him when The Guardian (and just about every other organ) condemned his mooning Michael Jackson at the Brits in 1996. This is now seen as the gesture that cemented his reputation as…