Enid Blyton’s classic stories come to the big screen

Enid Blyton’s “Magic Faraway Tree” stories have delighted successive generations, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. And now, they have been adapted for the big screen by Simon Farnaby, whose credits include “Paddington 2”, and who is a master of the art of making films that tickle children and adults alike. And, happily, he and director Ben Gregor have done a “smashing job” – if you will forgive the Blyton-ese – not least by finding a “modern, relatable context” for stories published in the 1940s.

Claire Foy stars as Polly, an electronic engineer who quits her job rather than work on a smart fridge that gathers data on its owners. As a result, she and her affable husband Tim (Andrew Garfield) have to give up their device-filled modern home in the city and move to a ramshackle barn in the country with their three screen-addicted children. The older two initially resist their parents’ appeals to immerse themselves in nature, but the youngest, who is mute, explores the area and finds a magical tree inhabited by a group of extraordinary characters.

This is a “sweet-natured family fantasy”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, with lots of jokes and peril too, notably in the form of the evil Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson with a weird asymmetric hairdo). I accept that Blyton – with her references to “swarthy foreigners” and the like – needed to be updated, said Kevin Maher in The Times, but Farnaby has created an over-complicated screenplay that strips the tale of its wonder. The children enjoy a few adventures that are “poorly realised” with “a DIY aesthetic”. Then we rush back to find out if Tim has fulfilled his dream of starting a pasta sauce business. Frequently collapsing into “skits” and “awkward flights of fancy”, the film is a “mess”.

by Liza Minnelli 

“The 20th century was not short of famous people who led ludicrously unsustainable lives,” said Hadley Freeman in The Times. But there can’t be many “more ludicrous or unsustainable” lives than that of Liza Minnelli. The 80-year-old singer and actor, best known for playing the bowler hat-wearing Sally Bowles in “Cabaret”, received lessons in “how to be famous” from her mother, Judy Garland, who died from an overdose aged 47.

“Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine,” she writes: her early life was spent negotiating Garland’s “mood swings and addictions”; she inherited a lifelong addiction to alcohol and drugs, and a tendency to fall for unsuitable men. In her long-awaited memoir, Minnelli catalogues the highs and lows without ever sinking into self-pity. Full of sentences that verge on self-parody – “I was married to a gay man at the same time as I was engaged to two other men” – it is both “heartrending” and hilarious. “If there’s a more enthralling celebrity memoir out this year, I’ll eat my bowler hat.”

The book’s “strongest section” is that detailing Minnelli’s “complicated childhood”, said Joanne Kaufman in The Wall Street Journal. Garland split from Liza’s father – the Italian film director Vincente Minnelli – in 1951. Soon after this, Garland attempted suicide for the first time, and Liza was forced to become “Mama’s mama” – or, as she puts it, her “nurse, doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one”. Once Minnelli embarked upon her own career, she also had to negotiate her mother’s tempestuous jealousy, said Tanya Gold in The Observer. Appearing with Garland at the London Palladium aged 18, Minnelli received a loud ovation only to hear her mother whisper to the producer: “Harold, get her off my f**king stage.”

Despite wanting to “grow up differently”, Minnelli couldn’t stop herself “repeating old patterns”, said Helen Brown in The Telegraph. She details her abuse of Valium and booze, and her often disastrous love life: married and divorced four times, she was also briefly engaged to Peter Sellers, and had an affair with Martin Scorsese. While Minnelli isn’t afraid to call out bad behaviour – she describes her fourth husband, David Gest, as a “pasty-faced jerk with weird hair” – there are few traces of bitterness: Minnelli is a “funny and generous” narrator. Co-written by her friend Michael Feinstein in an “intimate, chatty style”, this is a “high-kicking hoofer of a book”.

Former PM of France who brought in the 35-hour week

Lionel Jospin, who has died aged 88, became prime minister of France in June 1997 – just a month after Tony Blair was swept to power in the UK, said The Times. They were both politicians of the centre-left, who – to different degrees – had concluded that their parties needed to be more pragmatic in their embrace of market reforms. But whereas Blair won three successive elections, Jospin served just five years before being dramatically knocked out of the first round of the presidential race in April 2002. The polls had predicted that he would face the incumbent, Jacques Chirac, in the runoff, and many thought that he’d make it to the Élysée Palace. But in the event, he was pushed into third place by Jean-Marie Le Pen, of the far-right National Front.

A far-right candidate had never reached the final round before, and it is hard to overstate the shock this result caused in France, said The Guardian. Outside the Socialist Party HQ in Paris, Jospin’s supporters, many in tears, gathered to hear him say that he took full responsibility for this “bolt from the blue”, and that he’d be leaving politics. Thus the man who had introduced France’s 35-hour week, universal health cover and civil partnerships for same sex and heterosexual couples “disappeared into political exile”. Two weeks later, Chirac was re-elected in a landslide, thanks to parties from across the spectrum forming a “Republican front” to keep Le Pen out. But having made this breakthrough, the far-right remained a major presence in French politics.

Lionel Jospin was born into a Protestant and socialist family in Meudon, a suburb of Paris, in 1937. His father was a teacher; his mother had been a midwife, and was said to have raised herself up during his birth by lying on copies of works by Voltaire. He went to his local lycée, then attended the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and the elite École nationale d’administration, a hothouse for senior civil servants. On graduating, he went straight into a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But in the late 1950s, he had taken part in the student protests against the brutal war in Algeria, and unbeknown to his employers, he had by then joined the Trotskyist International Communist Organisation under a pseudonym. He remained a clandestine member of it until the 1980s.

During the student uprisings of 1968, he left his job, took up a university post, and joined the newly formed Socialist Party, where François Mitterrand, its leader from 1971, took a shine to him. He became an MP in 1981, the year Mitterrand became president. Jospin made his own first tilt at the presidency in 1995. Having been narrowly beaten by Chirac, he formed a left-wing coalition, which won the general election two years later. As PM, he led a government in opposition to the president (“cohabitation”, as it is known in France). Jospin was a moderniser, but he had no time for Blair’s market-friendly Third Way. His mantra was “yes to the market economy, no to the market society”. He nationalised hundreds of public companies, but also expanded the welfare state. Unemployment fell while he was in office, and he was able to cut taxes.

A serious man, he was admired for his integrity and competence (he oversaw France’s transition to the euro), but lacked popular appeal. His defeat in 2002, however, was largely due to his failure to unite various left-wing factions behind him. As a result, an array of candidates stood, splintering the left-wing vote. Four days after his defeat, he called on his supporters to “refuse the far-right” – but did not explicitly endorse Chirac.