breaking point when young vampires Eli walks into his life, made clear by her entrance as Oskar and a silent chorus of other schoolboys practise desperate self-defence with bread knives pilfered from family kitchens. Eli is a symbol of rebellion and escape, teaching Oskar how to taunt a local sweetshop owner and urging him to fight back, but the consequences of drifting into her feral world become increasingly clear. It could be argued that Thorne pulls away from some of the more explicit psychosexual content of Lindqvist’s novel, but by relying on suggestion to a greater extent than either film version, questions are left to hang threateningly in the wintry air.

Martin Quinn proves himself an incredible find in his stage debut as Oskar, immediately likeable but frighteningly weak,Fifty years after his death, Stalin remains a figure of powerful and dark fascination. The almost unfathomable scale of his crimes–as many as 20 million Soviets died in his purges and infamous Gulag–has given him the lasting distinction as a personification of evil in the twentieth century. But though the facts of Stalin’s reign are well known, this remarkable biography reveals a Stalin we have never seen before as it illuminates the vast foundation–human, psychological and physical–that supported and encouraged him, the men and women who did his bidding, lived in fear of him and, more often than not, were betrayed by him.

BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of "Stalin."
I read an article about you -- actually, you wrote it, and you said, I became so immersed