Pamela Lane

A completely fresh insight into the mind of one of the UK's greatest playwrights, the letters between John Osborne and his first wife, actressPamela Lane, are also a love letter to a now defunct system of repertory theatre, and life in post-war Britain.As these letters reveal, soon after their divorce, Osborne and Lane began a mutually supportive, loyal, frequently stormy and sometimes sexually intimate alliance lasting thirty years until Osborne's death. By the mid-1980s, they had become closer and more trusting than they had been since their earliest years together. `You are for me what you always were,' Pamela told him, `I am in love with you still.' It is, he declared, `my fortune to have loved someone for a lifetime.'Acerbic, witty, candid and heartbreaking, they reveal a unique relationship, troubled, tender and enduring.

Dr Dan Selby, a socio-meteorologist working for Clifton university, suspects that the climate, peppered by ferocious storms, has flipped to a new phase of instability and extremes. Selby's phrase, 'the Credit Crunch of the eco-systems, ' links the collapsing economies of the western world and the worsening weather conditons, as we have been living beyond our means, environmentally, for decades. First the UK has suffered five years of relentless rain - the Deluge - while the US withers under a drought. Then the rain stops. Selby warns that the climate will heat up rapidly now that the Deluge in the UK no longer masks the greenhouse effect which is relentlessly building in the rest of the world. Others disagree, believing that a new sunspot minimum has begun which will cool the climate down and cancel out the effects of global warming. Selby sees that the new currencies in a warmer and more volatile world are food and energy. As Britain's food reserves dwindle, the shortfall can no longer be made up by buying from countries as desperate as ourselves. Politics is becoming side-lined and the fabric of society is starting to fray. An increase in storm activity, Selby believes, will be the last straw which spoils any attempts to maintain food security, leading to a new period of decline and hardship. On the horizon the clouds gather. Are we the generation who threw it all away