Oscar Wilde's classic comedy is given a 'bold and brash' update

"Think of it as an adult panto," said Clive Davis in The Times. Director Max Webster has given Oscar Wilde's classic comedy a "bold and brash" reboot, and it has an awful lot going for it.

There's some "comic acting of the highest order", from Hugh Skinner as an anxious Jack, and from Sharon D. Clarke as a Caribbean-accented Lady Bracknell. And Ncuti Gatwa (of "Doctor Who" fame) is charming as the "preening sybarite" Algernon – "tossing off witticisms as if they're going out of fashion", said Nick Curtis in London's The Standard. Traditionalists might not love the production, with its camp, almost knockabout humour and "'Bridgerton'-style colourblind casting". But I found it "fizzing", fascinating and fun.

This 1895 play's "subtext of homoerotic desire" has been mined before, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. But not like this; we've not seen "Algernon whirling onto the stage in a hot pink gown, like Marilyn Monroe on acid, or Ernest camping it up with hand on hip". And Algernon's "Bunburyism" (the deception that allows him to adopt a double life) has "never sounded more like a sexual double entendre". This is a lavish production with gorgeous costumes and pop culture references, but which strikes a well-judged balance between "fidelity to Wilde's text and 21st-century playfulness". You feel Wilde himself would be thrilled by all the mischief and misbehaviour on display, even if it is "subversion-lite": the "same-sex gropes and innuendoes don't seem to belong to the characters but are simply there, frothily transgressive rather than sharply satirical".

It's very enjoyable, said Sarah Crompton on What's On Stage, but I felt that some of the bum jokes and pratfalls had been added "at the expense" of Wildean wit.

Yes, there is definitely "some straining after laughter", said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph, but it is often won. And the production contains fine performances, with Clarke deserving the main plaudits for her "sedate, imperious, fabulously attired" Lady Bracknell.

by S.J. Naudé  

This "strange and beautiful" – if nihilistic – novel tells the story of Daniel, a gay South African writer, said Daniel Clarke in the TLS. Translated from Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns, it "unfolds over a series of fragmented episodes, often set years apart". The first takes place in London, and describes a sexual encounter Daniel has with two Serbian men he befriends at an art gallery. Months later, he visits them in Germany, and they go on a "surreal, Pinteresque camping trip". Soon after this, Daniel returns to South Africa, to care for his dying, incapacitated father – a bully whom Daniel now taunts with tales of his sexual escapades. In the event-filled final third, he spends a month living on his cousin's farm.

Part of the wonder of this novel is the "magical way it wrong-foots you", said Robert Collins in The Times. From being a portrait of a "drifting cosmopolitan", it turns into a study of "post-Apartheid race relations" – and finally a "heart-swelling" story about "how we raise boys". It may be less than 200 pages, but it "packs an enormous punch". It's the "perfect antidote" for our age of fragile masculinity.

The grande dame of the blockbuster novel

It was Graham Greene who set Barbara Taylor Bradford on the road to becoming one of the world's bestselling novelists, said The Guardian. The Yorkshire-born, New York-based writer had established herself as a successful journalist, with a dozen syndicated columns focused on interior design, but her attempts at fiction had failed. Then, in the mid-1970s, she read Greene's quote: "Character is plot." A light switched on, she recalled. "Suddenly, I understood what writing fiction was: it's who you are, what your protagonist is." A "wimpy sort of person" would get nowhere, she said. She resolved that she would write about the kind of strong, ambitious women that she'd always admired. And so "A Woman of Substance" was born. A blockbuster telling the story of a kitchen maid who works her way up to become the multimillionaire owner of a global business empire, it spent 43 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List and sold well over 30 million copies.

Before long, Bradford, who has died aged 91, was getting letters from fans asking for more books about her heroine – leading to several sequels and a prequel. From her plush home on the Upper East Side, she produced books at a prodigious rate. According to her website, she wrote 40, all of which were bestsellers, said The Telegraph. They were overwritten ("the sea was… the colour of chalcedony"), and sprinkled with clichés: Irish women start every sentence "To be sure", Yorkshire folk are "canny and down to earth". Critics also complained that her plots were formulaic and long-winded, said The New York Times. But BTB, as she was known, didn't care. She was not writing to impress the literary world. "I'm a commercial writer," she said, "a storyteller." And her books had a huge audience: translated into 40 languages, they sold 90 million copies. Her fortune was estimated at $300 million.

It was often said that her plots were inspired by her own rags-to-riches story. In fact, she had not started in rags, but grew up in middle-class comfort in the suburbs of Leeds. Her maternal grandmother had been in a workhouse, but her mother had "bettered herself" and become a nurse. Her father was an engineer. Her parents encouraged her to read (she'd read all of Dickens by her teens) and to write: she'd started writing stories when she was seven, and was given a typewriter when she was 10. She was sent to a private school but, impatient to get on with her life, she left at 15, and got a job at the Yorkshire Evening Post. She was hired as a typist, but would slip her own pieces onto the subs' desk and was soon promoted to cub reporter. Her colleagues in the newsroom included Peter O'Toole (he asked her on a date, but he was "lanky and dishevelled", so she turned him down), and Keith Waterhouse, who became a friend. Aged 18, she was made editor of the women's pages, and aged 20 she moved to London to become the fashion editor of Woman's Own.

She'd never imagined settling down with a "local lad"; and in 1963 she married Robert Bradford, a German-born film producer. Soon after, they moved to New York. They were unable to have children, which was a source of regret, but they were very happy. (One of her early books was called "How to be the Perfect Wife".) He died in 2019. Though she lived for 60 years in the US, she retained a keen interest in British affairs, and admired Thatcher in particular. "Someone once wrote that if Margaret Thatcher had not existed, Barbara Taylor Bradford would have invented her," she told The Telegraph's Liz Hoggard. In the 2000s, she learnt her mother had been illegitimate, and that her grandfather may have been the Marquis of Ripon, in whose house her grandmother had worked as a servant. She was shocked, but it inspired another book. Her final book, "The Wonder of It All", came out last year.