The great masterpiece of Jewish drama, Solomon Ansky's The Dybbuk, draws on the ancient belief that the soul of a person who dies before their time will enter and possess a living person. Julia Pascal's "Holocaust Trilogy" refers obliquely to this legend. Just like the modern woman in the final play, Pascal is haunted by all the lost faces of her relatives: "I have so many dybbuks!" her plays seem to cry out.

This is the story of an extraordinary life and a remarkable book. It is the life of Gitta Sereny, among the most distinguished of present- day journalists, who was in her early teens when the Germans invaded her native Vienna. The subject of her book, published this month to great acclaim, is Albert Speer, one of Hitler's closest associates, designer of his great rallies and architect of his grandiose buildings. At the Nuremberg trials, he escaped the death penalty by denying complicity in the extermination of the Jews. Could he possibly have been telling the truth? In Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, Sereny proves beyond doubt that he was lying. This was in part the product of her unequalled pertinacity and formidable investigative powers. But there was another factor. Her life seemed to lead her inexorably to confrontation with Speer. And that, in this piece written for the literary magazine Granta, is the story she tells here.

The history books refer to them, if they refer to them at all, as the Sweet. To the pre-pubescent hard-core they were always Sweet. That definite article - not that at nine you knew it was a definite article - was the sort of word you'd find frontloaded on a wholesome foursome from the Sixties. Slade didn't have one, nor Mud; not even Smokie.

Simon Callow recalls how a revelation in Covent Garden turned him from sceptical schoolboy into man of the theatre

HIS LUNGS bleeding with every breath, he gave her a handkerchief and asked her to wipe the blood from his mouth without the audience seeing. And then on he went, to sing glorious, exuberant Donizetti one last time. Mary Ellis was 21, on stage with Caruso for his final performance at the Met. Now, more than 70 years on, she shudders, remembering the secret of the "terrible, velvet richness" of his voice that night. Spellbound, we listened to the crackly old record of "Una furtiva lagrima", familiar from so many archive programmes, and imagined that brave, good-natured man delighting frivolous New York while he sang his very life away.

Athletics

Television

The great Russian photographer YEVGENY KHALDEI has lived and worked through some of the most cataclysmic events of our terrible century. BRIAN MOYNAHAN introduces the man and his work, and on the following pages Khaldei himself provides a commentary for some of the most memorable images from his pr ivate archive

Writing in this newspaper last week, Bryan Appleyard reckoned that Adam Curtis's The Living Dead (BBC2) was the most important documentary series of the year. Immediately after watching last night's portentously titled opener in a series of three historical re-appraisals, "On the Desperate Edge of Now", I thought Appleyard must be going gaga. Rarely have I disagreed so vigorously with a television film. But then I realised that was his point. The standard documentary procedure is to win viewers by confirming prejudices and massaging preconceptions. And here was a documentary telling us that that in which we most fondly believed was a fiction. Not comfortable at all.

GLASGOW MAYFEST: ROUND-UP

'For 400 years our poems and paintings have shown black people worn out with toil and struggle. Now we've got to paint pictures of beautiful, fat faces looking into the sunrise.' John Kani, executive director of Johannesburg's Market Theatre

If Serbs responsible for atrocities escape trial, we fail humanity and escalate a spiral of evil If what the Nazis did was not absolutely wrong, then human life is a joke

Heinz Bernard Lowenstein (Heinz Bernard), actor, director; born Nuremberg 22 December 1923; married Nettie, Lowenstein (two sons, one daughter); died London 18 December 1994.

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