Ido Fluk’s ‘jaunty’ film about a teenage concert promoter

Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln Concert” is not only the bestselling jazz solo album of all time; it is the bestselling piano album of any kind, said Demetrios Matheou on The Arts Desk. Yet the concert it records would never have taken place had it not been for the determination of a local teenager.

Ido Fluk’s film takes that story and “improvises the hell out of it”: it focuses not on Jarrett (we don’t hear even a note of the album) but on Vera Brandes, the charismatic 18-year-old promoter who booked him, and then – when the exhausted, and notoriously testy, musician threatened to walk away – all but dragged him onto the stage. “The result is a jaunty, charming, highly enjoyable paean to both artists and the many who support them.”

The film opens at Brandes’ 50th birthday party, said Ben Nicholson on Little White Lies; then takes us back to the 1970s, a “freer, simpler time”, when the spirited young Vera (Mala Emde) has stumbled into organising German tour dates for Ronnie Scott. At a jazz festival in Berlin, she sees Jarrett (John Magaro) improvise, and is so mesmerised that she resolves to bring him to Cologne.

The action follows a familiar trajectory (Vera faces various obstacles, including the disapproval of her stern father), and Fluk resorts to familiar devices (including fourth-wall-breaking lectures to the camera about jazz) but “it’s absorbing and fun”, if not fresh or impactful.

“Köln 75” has a “self-aware swagger” that sometimes feels effortful, said Leila Latif in Empire, and some of the broad comedic moments jar. But Emde is superb – and in the final, suspenseful stretch, the film becomes exhilarating.

by Maggie O’Farrell

“Sometimes – rarely – there is a book that I want to read again immediately, the very moment I have reached its last page,” said Andrea Wulf in The New Statesman. “Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel ‘Land’ is such a book.”

Much of it is set on a peninsula on the western coast of Ireland in the 19th century, during and after the Great Famine. Tomás, an Irish mapmaker who works for the English Ordnance Survey, has a mystical experience there while drinking from a once-holy spring in a copse. There is a brief detour into the peninsula’s prehistory and history – druids, ritual sacrifice, the coming of Christianity, English colonisation – before O’Farrell returns to the 19th century and follows the story of Tomás, his wife and children. There is “regret, loss, rebellion, love, family… I love all of O’Farrell’s novels, but I think ‘Land’ might be her finest.” It is “intimate, tender and crushingly devastating. It sings off the page and pierces your heart.”

It “will, I predict, prove as divisive as ‘Hamnet’”, her best-known work, said Randy Boyagoda in the Financial Times. “Once again, O’Farrell has created a story replete with intensely emotive renderings of family stresses, strains and loss.” (She is sometimes accused of creating “grief porn”.) Initially rooted in western Ireland, it becomes a sprawling saga of empire-era migration. “O’Farrell offers all of this in an unceasingly ardent storytelling style. But heartstrings can only be pulled so much, for so long, before they loosen or snap.”

“Land” is ambitious and intriguing, said Melissa Harrison in The Guardian. But it “feels somehow uncomfortable in its own skin” – and strikingly short on dialogue. “Neither fable nor history nor family saga”, it is “not consistently or confidently inhabited”. But I can see it making “an epic and richly textured film”.

Dedicated public servant who spent six years as “C”

Sir Alex Younger, who has died of cancer aged 62, was the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, for six years, making him the longest-serving “C” in half a century. Affable and self-effacing but also steely, he was a man whose judgement and integrity could be trusted entirely – and he was extremely good at his job, said The Times. Not all of what he did during his long career at MI6 is in the public record, but it is known that he tracked down war criminals in the Balkans in the 1990s; that he was bureau chief in Kabul in the 2000s; and that, as head of counterterrorism, he oversaw security for the 2012 London Olympic Games. “The sense of pride at being part of an effort and cause greater than myself has never left me for a single day of nearly 30 years serving my country as an intelligence officer,” he said in 2018.

The codename “C” has been inherited by all heads of MI6 since Mansfield Cumming, who was its first, said The Guardian. Younger also carried on Cumming’s tradition of signing his initial in green ink. On retiring in 2020, he gave his MI6 pen to Daniel Craig while on a tour of the set of the Bond film “No Time to Die”. But he turned down a cameo in the film. Although he’d had plenty of Bond-like experiences, working undercover and navigating foreign conflict zones, he insisted that 007 would not have a place in the modern service. In a letter to The Economist, he wrote: “I’ll take the quiet courage and integrity of George Smiley over the brash antics of 007 any day.”

Born in London in 1963, he was the son of Nicholas Younger, of the brewing family, and Mary Edge, a general’s daughter. He was educated at Marlborough College, then studied economics and computer science at St Andrews. In 1986, he joined the Scots Guards. He’d first been approached by MI6 while a student, and signed up in 1991. “I’m basically a romantic,” he said. “I believe in human agency. I love the fact that individuals can make a difference; in however small a way, I wanted to be one of those people.” He spent the next 25 years working in the shadows, posing as a civil servant, or mid-level diplomat. His children did not know what he did; at the urging of his wife, Sarah Hopkins, an arts administrator, he did, however, eventually tell his mother that he was a spy. “Yes, darling, so was I,” she replied.

He took over as “C” from Sir John Sawers in 2014. A man of “great courage”, with a “clear moral compass”, he became very popular in what insiders called “the office”, said the Financial Times. He sought to dispel the service’s elite image, and pushed it to recruit from a broader range of backgrounds. He promoted what he called “fourth-generation espionage”, fusing traditional, human-led spycraft with expertise in data analytics, AI and so on. His tenure coincided with Islamic State campaigns in Iraq and Syria, and the Salisbury poisonings. He stepped down in 2020, his term having been extended to promote stability during Brexit.

Last year, he told the BBC that he’d got a kick out of being in this “play that no one knows is even going on”, but that the work had also been “incredibly isolating”. He and Sarah had three children; one of them, Sam, was killed in a car accident in 2019. It was, he said, “so terrible that you can’t articulate it”. But he also revealed he had received messages of condolence from “some of our most implacable adversaries. And in a strange way, that gave me some hope.”