Age: 23
Age: 23
A year or so ago I bought some lovely skewers with a pig design on from my favourite cookshop in Paris, E Dehillerin in the Rue Coquillière. I've actually only just started using them but they look great, in a twee sort of way. This recipe involves most bits of the pig but you can really use whatever cuts and offal you fancy. It's also a great way to use rare breed pork from farms where you have to buy a quarter of a beast. Richard Vaughan at Huntsham Farm in Herefordshire does exactly that with his Middle White pork and Longhorn beef.
A 14-part series that attempts to make simple and accessible one of the most complex subjects imaginable will be distributed via booklets given away free with The Independent and The Independent on Sunday beginning tomorrow, and will simultaneously be made available at independent.co.uk/historyoftheworld. Starting with the origins of the Universe itself, it traces the formation of our planet, the first stirrings of life, the shaping of the continents, the evolution of species, the birth of the human race, and the millennia of history that have led up to the sophisticated but precarious civilisations of the present day.
pNicholas Wright is one of my favourite dramatists. I love the way that he can take vastly heterogeneous subject matter - from Melanie Klein to Vincent Van Gogh, from James Mossman to Terence Rattigan and Nijinsky -- and excavate acutely fresh and sharply researched plays that nonetheless have very distinctive finger marks on them. This reminds me a little of the relationship between Simon Russell Beale and his roles. It is furthermore wonderful that, at seventy one, Wright seems to be more productive than ever. So how to account for the mis-step that is his latest play, Travelling Light, premiered now at the Lyttelton in a nothing-if-not-charming production by Nicholas Hytner. /p