LA FILLE MAL GARDeE ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL LONDON FREDERICK ASHTON'S La Fille Mal Gardee is surely the best, most enjoyable full-evening ballet created this century: full of sunshine and happiness. It has everything: a good story about interesting characters, invented by Jean...

Paul Taylor Kirov/Swan Lake MacMillan triple bill Any would-be choreographer can do conflict: a little arm- wrestling held together with the push-me-pull-you cliches of contact improvisation and you've got yourself a contemporary duet. Bliss is much, much harder but Paul Taylor...

[In Alice Munro's vision there] are those of "the world," of society, of the accepted norms, and those "from the other country" …, people such as Miss Marsalles [in the title story of The Dance of the Happy Shades], whose innocence has made her, at the best, a fondly tolerated anachronism and, at the worst, a social embarrassment. Miss Marsalles, with [a] terrible faux pas, has placed herself in the same category as idiots, seniles, eccentrics, criminals, and the fa...