Conor McPherson's 'gripping' family drama

The acclaimed Irish playwright Conor McPherson's last original straight play was in 2013, and so the opening of "The Brightening Air", which returns him as writer-director to the Old Vic (where his acclaimed Bob Dylan musical "Girl from the North Country" premiered in 2017), feels like a "major theatrical event", said Dzifa Benson in The Daily Telegraph. Haunting and very funny, it is set in rural Sligo in the early 1980s, where Stephen (Brian Gleeson) and his sister Billie (Rosie Sheehy) still live in their crumbling family home, and seem likely to die there until relations arrive to disrupt their "self-made rut".

The play, which has (acknowledged) echoes of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya", veers into the numinous and the supernatural, said Nick Curtis in London's The Standard. There's "a religious revelation, an apparent miracle and the smiting of the unworthy. There's even a cosmic joke at the end." It may not be to all tastes, but I "bloody loved it".

Fitfully, the play is "utterly wondrous", said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage – "elevated by commanding performances from the entire cast". Sheehy is "devastating" as the eccentric and autistic Billie. Gleeson brings "troubled depth and underlying anger" to the passive, put-upon Stephen. And Chris O'Dowd is superb as their older, wealthier brother Dermot – leaning into his character's "monstrous self-absorption, timing each line for maximum impact". But McPherson crams in too much. There isn't enough room to breathe between the twists and revelations, which makes this "gripping" play ultimately frustrating: "so nearly great, so nearly soaring, yet somehow held earthbound by the weight of its intent".

It has plenty of charm, and some "searing moments", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. But the evening could do with "more momentum and emotional drive". It's not that anything rings false in McPherson's "delicious dialogue", said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. The problem is that "changes happen a tad too slowly in the first half, a tad too quickly in the second". But even if the play doesn't quite add up, "it's far more interesting than plenty of plays that do".

by Tim Bouverie  

Can "anything new be said about the Second World War", asked Adam Sisman in The Observer. "Unexpectedly the answer is yes." Among the "surprising facts" I learnt from this "revelatory book" are that pro-Russian feeling was so strong in Britain in 1942 that "War and Peace" became a bestseller, and that Mahatma Gandhi considered Hitler "not as bad as he is depicted". A "work of old-fashioned diplomatic history", "Allies at War" focuses on the fraught and often shifting alliances between the countries that opposed the Axis powers: chiefly Britain, America, the Soviet Union, but also the Free French (led by Charles de Gaulle) and China. In the foreground are the "Big Three" leaders – Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – but there are also "walk-on parts" for a host of foreign ministers, ambassadors and emissaries. Although Tim Bouverie has clearly done his research, he doesn't let this overwhelm his narrative, which is consistently lucid, entertaining and witty.

In public, the Allies were mostly "models of civility", said Caroline Moorehead in The Spectator. But privately, their dealings were beset by "ancestral grudges", "profound suspicion" and differing views on the "sort of peace they sought". Bouverie charts their fallings-out and reconciliations with "great sensitivity and sometimes humour", said William Waldegrave in The Independent. His book starts with "British policy based on the presumed rock of the French army" – a faith crushed in May 1940 when Nazi tanks rolled into Paris – and with "Stalin supporting the German economy and war machine". It ends with Roosevelt (and to a lesser extent Churchill) so "genuinely" trusting of "Uncle Joe" that they agree to "horrible things" at the Yalta Conference of 1945, not least the repatriation of thousands of eastern Europeans "to their deaths in the Soviet Union".

A big strength of Bouverie's book is how it takes in many of the War's lesser-known struggles and connects them to its main narrative, said Andrew Roberts in The Daily Telegraph. He covers the Iraqi revolt of May-June 1941, and the sacrifices made by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China (which lost around 15 million people) – and shows how these created "stresses and strains" which impacted relations between the Big Three. As well as being historically illuminating, his book is also "extremely timely" – for it comes at a time when, thanks to Donald Trump, the Western alliance that has "kept the peace between the Great Powers for 80 years" is under strain as never before.

Nobel laureate who ran for the Peruvian presidency

A giant of world literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, who has died in Lima aged 89, was a Peruvian novelist and essayist, and one of the stars of the "Latin American boom", along with Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, and the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. Translated into more than 30 languages, his books sold in their millions. He was fêted all over Europe (he had homes in London, Paris and Barcelona); and, in 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although his books covered a wide range of genres, they tended to explore political themes, said The Daily Telegraph. Like most of his contemporaries in the intelligentsia, he'd embraced Marxism in his youth, and welcomed the revolution in Cuba. But he was later appalled by Castro's treatment of dissident writers, and became convinced that freedom and stability in Peru and other South American nations depended on reducing the power of the state and embracing free-market liberalism – what he called Andean Thatcherism. He had been much inspired by meeting Margaret Thatcher at a dinner in 1982.

His conversion cost him many friends, including Márquez, whom he once punched in the face at a film screening – though their falling out may also have been personal: it was rumoured that Márquez had told Vargas Llosa's wife she was being cheated on. But he stuck to his guns and, in the late 1980s, with the death toll from Peru's Shining Path insurgency mounting, inflation running at 1,000%, and the government poised to nationalise the banks, he moved into politics. Handsome, urbane and cultured, with near rock-star status, he launched a movement called Liberty, and in 1990 ran for the presidency. But having led in the polls, he lost to Alberto Fujimori – an obscure Japanese-Peruvian agronomist who scooped up the vote of poor and indigenous Peruvians by casting himself as an outsider and Vargas Llosa as a representative of the elite. Once in power, however, Fujimori adopted many of Vargas Llosa's neoliberal policies, adding a large dose of authoritarianism. Stung by his defeat, Vargas Llosa moved back to Europe.

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born in Arequipa, Peru's second city, in 1936. His mother, Dora, came from a grand Spanish family; his father, Ernesto, worked as a radio operator. Ernesto abandoned the family soon after Mario was born, and Dora then moved with their children to Bolivia, where her father was working as a diplomat. Vargas Llosa was told that his father had died, but when he was 10, Ernesto reappeared, and persuaded Dora to return with him to Lima. There, he was violent to her and "terrorised" his bookish son, said The Times. Aged 14, Vargas Llosa was sent to a military academy – which inspired his first novel, "The Time of the Hero" (1963). At 16, he became a crime reporter and, aged 19, he eloped with his aunt-by-marriage, Julia Urquidi Illanes, who was 10 years his senior. This formed the basis of his novel "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter", which was later made into a film. They divorced after nine years, and he then married his cousin, Patricia, with whom he had three children.

By 1960, he was living in Europe, where he had been embraced by a literary set in Paris that included Márquez and Fuentes. Some of his early works, such as 1969's "Conversation in a Cathedral", which explores the impact of dictatorship on Peru through a series of conversations, have elements of magical realism. However, he remained closer to the realist tradition, said The Guardian, in books that contained "sweeping criticism of the state of Peruvian and, more widely, Latin American society".

After the 1990 election, he did not involve himself directly in politics, but used his syndicated column in El País to make his views on a range of issues known across South America. He also produced more novels, including 2000's "The Feast of the Goat", about the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. In 2015, soon after hosting a party to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary, he left Patricia and took up with Isabel Preysler, a socialite who'd been married to Julio Iglesias. As a result, he became for a while a staple of the celebrity magazine ¡Hola!. They split up in 2022, and he was subsequently reconciled with Patricia, who survives him.