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Guests:
Novelist, Linda Grant
Writer and music journalist, Paul Morley
Historian, Dominic Sandbrook

On this week’s Saturday Review, Tom and his guests explore life under the heel of tyrants – and what it takes to overthrow them.

In Valkyrie, Tom Cruise plays Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the leader of the ‘July 20’ plot to kill Hitler, marginalise the SS and seize power.Bryan Singer’s film shows just how close von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, played by the likes of Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh and Eddie Izzard, came to changing the course of history. But does it shed much light on why they did it?

Valkyrie is on general release from Friday 23 January, ceritificate 12A.

Generation Kill is the new TV drama from David Simon and Ed Burns, the writers behind the much-lauded HBO series The Wire. It’s a close-up portrait of US Marines at the sharp end of the invasion which overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. The series’ fly-on-the-warts-and-all verisimilitude is drawn from a book by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright, who was embedded with the troops. But does it have anything new to tell us about the ousting of Iraq’s dictator?

The first episode of Generation Kill is on the FX channel on Sundays at 10pm from 25 January.

Meanwhile, another journalist tries to make sense of life under the Saddam regime itself. In The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Wendell Steavenson unpicks the moral tangles involved in trying to build a career in the service of the despot, as experienced by Saddam’s military commanders and their families.

The Weight of a Mustard Seed is published by Atlantic Books.

The panel go to see a rare revival of Tom Stoppard and André Previn’s 1977 play, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, about a Soviet political prisoner incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

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