Saturday Review

The film A Late Quartet features a beloved cellist of a world-renowned string quartet who receives a life changing diagnosis. The quartet's future now hangs in the balance as suppressed emotions, competing egos, and uncontrollable passions threaten to derail years of friendship and collaboration. Levels of Life, Julian Barnes's new novella, blends history, fiction and memoir around love, grief and ballooning. It opens in the nineteenth century with balloonists, photographers, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt, whose adventures lead the story into an entirely personal account of the author's own great loss.A history of our love affair with tea features in Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea TV two-parter. She travels from the back streets of Calcutta to the bright lights of Shanghai to find out how one small plant united East and West, triggered wars and helped win them. Along the way she witnesses a world of chai wallahs, opium smokers and Assam tea-pickers, and asks how the cuppa became such an important part of B