22/09/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests cultural historian Christopher Frayling, writer Sarfraz Manzoor and historian Kathryn Hughes review the week's cultural highlights

Brad Pitt stars as enforcer/hitman Jackie Cogan in Andrew Dominik's film Killing Them Softly - based on George V Higgins' 1974 novel Cogan's Trade. Cogan is called in to set things right after an illegal poker game is robbed. Set against the background of the runup to the 2008 presidential election, the film draws parallels between the need for economic stability in America's financial institutions and in its increasingly corporate criminal enterprises.

Caryl Churchill's new play Love and Information at the Royal Court in London is a collection of 57 short fragments featuring more than 100 characters. Directed by James Macdonald, the succession of short scenes is performed in a white gridded box by a cast which includes Linda Bassett and Sarah Woodward.

Building Stories by Chris Ware is not a conventional graphic novel. It comes in a box containing 14 separate books, pamphlets and posters. Together they tell the stories of the inhabitants of a down-at-heel tenement in Chicago. The order in which the separate elements are read is entirely up to the reader.

Happy Birthday Edward Lear: 200 Years of Nature and Nonsense at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is an exhibition which celebrates the bicentenary of the artist's birth. Although it contains some of his nonsense poetry and illustrations, it mainly concentrates on the foreign landscapes and natural history paintings that he worked on throughout his life.

Homefront written by Sue Teddern is a new drama series on ITV1 which follows the lives of a group of mothers and wives of soldiers serving in Afghanistan. Claire Skinner plays the fiancee of a commanding officer, trying to find her feet in a world which combines the normality of domestic life with constant pressure and anxiety.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.