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Doctoring Zhivago
Boris 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 version p
Lighting a fuse
CONFERENCE REPORT: Scots are bigoted and self-pitying wrote Andrew O'Hagan in the 'London Review of Books'. The ensuing controversy made for a lively conference on Scottish literature at Trinity College, writes Belinda McKeon p
Arts
Portrait of many layers
Boomerang theatre company has teamed up with an Amsterdam group to stage John Osborne's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray - and added their own interpretation. Mary Leland reports pWhen the music takes control . . .
Jazz trumpeter Tom Harrell, who plays Dublin next week, is an exceptional musician, made all the more remarkable by his battle with schizophrenia, writes Ray Comiskey p
Books of the year: who read what in 2002
What were the best books and who were their authors? Belinda McKeon finds out from people who should know: novelists, poets, historians, academics, critics, politicians and others. pTales from the underbelly
HISTORY: ‘The British were not very nice, but they were interesting," Linda Colley told her audience at a Millennium Lecture on empire hosted by Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in 1999. "English, Welsh, Scots and Irish have all, to differing degrees, been greedy, pushy, intrusive traders and warmongers, aggressive, violent, frequently oppressive, often arrogant and perfidious. pEssential reading for pleasure
BIOGRAPHY: In a short note on "The Pleasure of Reading" written in 1992, the Belfast-born novelist Brian Moore identified three books from his teenage years that greatly influenced him. pA haunting performance
FICTION: When snowbound in Siberia, waiting for a train that appears destined never to emerge from the vast white nothingness, the narrator takes refuge in the kind of restless meditation that helps to pass the time. Except, of course, the time has long passed, writes Eileen Battersby.
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Consolation for the Cathars
The cultural legacy of an ancient religious sect that was almost wiped out in the Inquisition is everywhere to be seen in the south of France - and its influence today is now more evident than Catholicism, writes Michael Foley pRavaging oak woods for ravishing houses
ANOTHER LIFE/Michael Viney: My fantasy life as a do-it-yourself architect is nourished these days by TV programmes taped for us by a daughter living in the urban cableland. Grand Designs the other night was about a young English couple who built a big, cross-shaped country house, framed entirely in green oak. pHorizons
Whales and oil: A new $12 billion ExxonMobil oil-drilling project just off Russia's Sakhalin Island will threaten the endangered Western Pacific grey whale, according to this month's Ecologist magazine. pEye on Nature
Readers' observations and questions on nature p
