Items

• Poet and peasant

  "Should public money be spent on the arts."
• Kidnap plot warning to cricket club

  [Full Text]: "A warning of an alleged plot by anti-apartheid demonstrators to kidnap Mr. Jack Baddiley, chairman of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, was telephoned to Mr. Ron Poulton, the club secretary, yesterday. He treated it as a joke but his caller, a man with an educated voice, told him: "It's no laughing matter." The police, however, took the threat seriously, and set out to find Mr. Baddiley, who was working on his 1,000-acre farm at Worksop. A police spokesman said later that special precautions were being taken. Wilson in race complaint. The Prime Minister and six other men were named in a complaint laid at Bow Street police station yesterday under the 1965 Race Relations Act. Mr. Peter Tombs, of Evans Road, Eynsham. Oxfordshire, a writer, said statements inciting unlawful race discrimination had been made on the B.B.C.'s Panorama programme by Mr. Wilson, Mr. John Arlott, Mr. Peter Hain, Mr. Jeffrey Crawford, the Bishop of Woolwich, the Right Rev. David Sheppard, Mr. Denis Brutus and Mr John Darragh."
• In a monastery garden

  "It was inevitable that Malcolm Muggeridge would enter a monastery.
• Alf where are you?

  "Johnny Speight must be pondering the fearful ironies of satirical humour."
• Monday 31 August

  "10.00 FILM. Stars Georgina Ackerman, Roger Griffiths, Thomas Baptiste and Pitika Ntuli. African voyage of rediscovery about an irrepressible 12-year-old girl Ama, and her family's struggle to reconcile their ancestral history with life in 20th century London. (1990)"
• BBC1

  "Great Railway Journeys. London to Arcadia. With Ben Okri"
• Stirrings of Genius

  "On the right track: Town Owen Edmond's photograph of a Syrian train guard from More Great Railway journeys, with contributions from such intrepid travellers, as Chris Bonington, Ben Okri, Alexei Sayle, and Victoria Wood."
• Critics' choice

  "Ben Okri, always good value on television, takes several trains and a boat to reach Peloponesse, after departing Waterloo aboard the Eurostar."
• Diary

  "A researcher from the programme recently contacted the Nigerian-born writer, Ben Okri, to arrange an interview about his Booker shortlisted novel The Famished Road."
• The intellectuals and the masses

  "Salt is confident that he's come up with a comparable set of thinkers - de Bono, Miller, Jardine, Ben Okri and Richard Dawkins."
• The Sunday Times Guide to Today's Television

  "11.05 Arts Review...Show's annual celebration of the art scene interviews with...Ben Okri..."
• BBC1

  "Everyman: In The Shadow of a Saint. The film follows the journalist Ken Wiwa as he travels to Nigeria to bury his father, activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa."
• BBC1

  "The Americans. Barins returns to Nigeria to attaend the reburial of her brother Ken Saro-Wiwa."