The hotel on the other side of Lake Geneva cashed in on the delicious shamelessness of it. They hired out binoculars so that tourists could gawp pruriently at the Villa Diodati and its scandalous summer menage of the Shelleys; the "mad, bad, and dangerou

Howard Brenton’s play about the lives and loves of Shelley and his circle is as much about failed utopianism as it is about poetry. There’s a lot of talk of revolution, free love and new modes of living, but there’s a degree of selectivity to how these i

Salisbury Playhouse has announced its 2012 spring/summer season, the first to be programmed by new artistic director Gareth Machin. At the head of the programme is a new production of Howard Brenton’s Epsom Downs. The play will be directed by Machin and

By Graham Stewart London When in 2002 the BBC organized a viewers' poll to find the "Greatest Briton," there was some surprise that William Shakespeare managed only fifth place but none that Winston Churchill came out on top. The legacy of the British Em

VACLAV HAVEL, who died yesterday, was the only author I can think of who made it across the great divide between words-on-the-page and what the unimaginative call "the real world". It's one of those phrases which politicians use to mean "Don't get your h