Few people can write first class political commentary. Few people can write first class literary criticism. To my knowledge, only Bryan Appleyard does both. The eternal frustration that is the Sunday Times' erratic approach to uploading columns from their own magazine means that his most recent effort therein is, as far as I know, only available in hard copy. So, let me tell you that his piece on the National Theatre's forthcoming revival of Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" (a 30 year old, brilliantly clever piece about the terrors of the Soviet regime) is a characteristically powerful demonstration of both skills. Inter alia, he highlights (a) the demonstrators who assembled last year to mark the mass arrest of democracy demonstrators by Soviet goons were themselves arrested, and (b) the fact that in 2007 the political commentator who drew attention to the imprisonment in lunatic asylums of those with views inconvenient to the Putin regime was herself forcibly committed to the very asylum she had written about.
All of that makes any updating of the Stoppard/Previn piece entirely unnecessary.
I'd give you more detail, but I had come to the terminal without a hard copy as I had hoped in vain to find the piece online. All in all, this is not a satisfactory post without links to the relevant columns... perhaps if the point's made frequently enough, our friends over at www.timesonline.com might notice..?
And an irrelevant but important P.S. - congratulations to Oxford University, which has retained the World Universities Debating Championships title at this year's round of the Championships, held at University College, Cork. I have judged both of the members of the team for years and know their success to be richly deserved. This country continues to perform at the highest levels in some competitions, at least!