CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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An august sense that ‘all human beings are kin’
Andy Croft’s 21st-century poetry
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Old people are everywhere. There are currently more than 11 million in Britain over retirement age, 20 per cent of the total population, and more than a million of them are aged 85 and over.
These are large numbers, more than enough to suggest that old people should exert a forceful presence in British society.
Unfortunately, they are mostly invisible, except as problems (“bed-blockers”), victims (care-home scandals) or figures of fun (The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, New Tricks or Quartet).
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ANDY CROFT rallies poets to the impossible task of speaking truth to a tin-eared politician