David Edgar has a fascinating essay at the LRB about the theatrical legacy of John Osborne. It's funny, I clicked on the link thinking "Oh, it's months ago that I first was reading reviews of this new Osborne biography, surely this is completely belated?" and yet it is a completely different piece than any of the others I've read, a good example of what the London Review of Books really does wonderfully well: Edgar uses the biography as the jumping-off point for an extremely perceptive and persuasive account of Osborne's role in twentieth-century British theater.
And a sidebar bonus: Jeremy Harding on a Syd Barrett biography published in 2003. (But I must disagree with him on The Wall; I haven't seen the film since the 80s, I will admit, but I remember watching it again and again with my brothers when we were in high school--it was one of only four or five movies that we had in the house, not a carefully selected pack but a slightly random set of oddments, the others as I recall being two excellent ones that should be in every collection--This Is Spinal Tap and The Shining--and two completely random ones--Romancing the Stone and Magnum Force. Readers are invited to contribute their own "surreal small movie collection" lists in the comments....)
For years, the only video my family owned was Something Wicked This Way Comes, starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce. I tried watching it years later, but the magic was gone.
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