Susannah Clapp

Rhoda Power photographed around 1910.

As​ a child I worried about the Russian Revolution. After all, it failed. At least that’s what schoolfriends, teachers and neighbours said. Yet I knew believers: my parents and a small core of companions who flew the red flag in improbable outposts, first Bath, then the London suburbs. Up to his death in the mid-1980s my dad, far more hardline...

Here is​ an antidote to current traps and poisons. People who rescue rather than attack, who move in a physical, not a virtual, world, who don’t morally triage others. Who put themselves in danger without aiming to get famous or on television. Who risk their lives without being paid.

Dominic Gregory has worked as an adviser to literary estates, including Roald Dahl’s, and run a...

It is​ a fascinating and fawning exhibition. At the King’s Gallery (until 18 October) some three hundred items of clothing belonging to Queen Elizabeth II are displayed – headless, limbless, fleshless – like the remains of extinct animals. Norman Hartnell supplies silky flamboyance and encrustations: lace re-embroidered with sequins and crystals. Hardy Amies, fresh from a...

Little magazines​: big guns. It is hard to overestimate the high hopes and strong feelings swirling around papers which are small in funds and circulation but large in aspiration. For a time the London Review of Books might have been considered a little magazine: uncertain of its future but clear it wanted to put a spoke in the Falklands War. The Little Review, thought to have originated...

Not exactly​ an addiction but a compulsion. When I started to write full-time about the theatre, I was fixated on television soaps. Not all of them. I didn’t have an afternoon habit. Just EastEnders, which I had watched from the beginning (and failed to persuade the then editor would be a subject for this paper), Coronation Street and Brookside. I would come home from King Lear or the