Americans may be amazed to hear that the big hit of the current London theater season is that sometimes clunky old classic, Inherit the Wind, that they probably last saw in a high school production.

Well, Trevor Nunn, who is directing it at the Old Vic, is not your high school drama teacher. Written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee in 1955, and based on the infamous Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925, the plot may be predictable (two lawyers slugging it out in the courtroom) but the acting, direction and staging are anything but. Just to refresh your memory, the play is based on the case of the Tennessee teacher who was indicted for reading a passage from On the Origin of the Species in his classroom. Kevin Spacey plays the Clarence Darrow-like lawyer, who argues the teacher’s case and David Troughton is the fundamentalist prosecutor. Both are superb. Nunn fills in the context with revivalist hymns linking scenes, a terrifying prayer meeting that fuels the mounting hysteria, and he had the brilliant idea of placing the jury in the front row of the stalls during the electrifying trial scene.
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Nitzkydorf, Romania, Noble Laureate Herta Muller's birthplace, is part of a German speaking region in a remote corner of Romania.

The big news among the chattering classes in London is that Hilary Mantel’s new novel, Wolf Hall (Henry Holt and Company) has won the Man Booker Prize. Mantel describes her book as a ‘Tudor soap opera’ which is a bit like Proust defining A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a soap opera about the Belle Epoque.

The drama may be familiar-Henry VIII dumping his wife, dissing the Pope, marrying that sex kitten Anne Boleyn and turning his country Protestant-but the way she tells it is anything but.

And if you thought Thomas More was the saintly hero of this saga, and Thomas Cromwell the evil villain, be prepared for a reversal of roles. Next time you are in New York check out their portraits, both by Holbein, glowering at each other in the Frick Museum. And on your next trip to London, grab a copy of Wolf Hall and take the slow boat down the Thames to Hampton Court, where all the main characters in this luminously written, and meticulously researched novel caroused, backstabbed and carried on far, far worse than anybody on the downest and dirtiest reality show.  

And the even bigger news among the German chattering classes of Nitzkydorf (pop 1,500) in Romania is that their home town girl, Herta Müller, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised her as a writer ‘who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.’ Ms. Müller emigrated to Germany in 1987 after years of censorship an persecution in Ceausescu’s Romania, where she had been a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of dissident writers who were  campaigning for freedom of speech.
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Running for the Q train this morning in Brooklyn I nearly knocked over my friend Matthew Hranek, a photographer, and neighbor who has shot more than a few extremely stylish stories for the magazine.

Matt is a true traveler, a hunter, a serious cook and an aficionado of rare and wonderful wine. But Matt doesn’t just indulge in all these delights, he keeps notes on his travels, food and wine in a notebook (leather bound from Smythson of London, no less) that has been his constant companion for the past five years. Sketches, menus, wine labels are all there along with lyrical descriptions of, for example, the time he bagged a wild boar in northern California and delivered it to Thomas Keller of Bouchon in Yountville, who created a special nose-to-tail menu based on Matt’s still bloody gift. So, try to imagine his despair when, on a recent rip to Washington and Montana, the book disappeared.

Back in Brooklyn, he mourned his loss and then, like the real man and hunter he is, moved on. But a couple of weeks later he got a call from a guy called David Sauter, a maintenance mechanic with Horizon Air. “Hey, you’ve been to some pretty cool restaurants, I’ve always wanted to try the calves brains at St John’s in London, and the wild boar at Bouchon.” What were the chances? David had found the notebook when they were disassembling the plane for a routine overhaul in Seattle and, being a serious foodie himself, had started to read it ... voraciously.

Three thousand miles apart, two food maniacs had found each other. The notebook was FedExed back to Matt, but no, David refused to accept the bottle of sublime wine Matt wanted to send him. Instead he insisted they get together the next time he was in Portland, “And dinner’s on me.”  Who said flying was no longer civilized?