07/07/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Susan Jeffreys and Alex Preston and historian Kathryn Hughes review the week's cultural highlights.

Samantha Spiro stars as Katherina and Simon Paisley Day is Petruchio in Toby Frow's exuberant production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe Theatre in London.

If This Is Home is Stuart Evers' first novel and centres around Mark - a young man desperate to get out of the small Cheshire town he grew up in. He moves to the US and adopts a completely new identity, but feels impelled to return 12 years later to try to make sense of what happened just before he left.

Daniel Nettheim's film The Hunter stars Willem Dafoe as a mercenary who is hired by a bio-tech company to hunt down a Tasmanian tiger - a marsupial presumed to be extinct - in the mountains of the Australian island state.

West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin returns to television after the success of his film The Social Network with a new series - The Newsroom. Jeff Daniels plays Will McAvoy - a celebrity news anchor in trouble after an intemperate outburst. Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) is hired to produce his new show and has a strong streak of idealism - but the two have some history.

Designing 007: 50 Years of Bond Style at the Barbican Gallery in London celebrates the behind-the-scenes talent that has made the Bond films such a popular and good-looking franchise for half a century.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.