Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

Sat 11 Nov 2002Doctoring ZhivagoBoris Pasternak's novel, 'Doctor Zhivago', may be the greatest love story of all time, writes Enda O'Doherty, but it is also much more - not that you can tell from David Lean's epic 1965 film, or from Andrew Davies's new television versionIn the Dublin of the 1960s and 1970s it was a byword for romance. Tucked away in an alley off Baggot Street, the entrance just a doorway behind H. Williams's supermarket, its proud claim to be "Europe's No 1 night spot" might have seemed a large one, but there were surely few of the patrons of Zhivago's who did not hope it might, for them too, turn out to be the place "where love stories begin".