How Ed Miliband and his team of hopefuls managed not to tap them is a question still engrossing the Labour Party, but the idea that its socialism was to blame never was convincing, if only because it didn't look or sound socialist.
(Little, Brown, $26). Writing about two Soviet Jews reunited decades after a devastating episode, Bezmozgis offers a novel of ideas and an engrossing story.
The first of these books was also one of the finest: in 1952, Samuel Rosenman, who wrote for Franklin D. Roosevelt and edited his presidential papers, published an engrossing account of the words, ideas and events of the 1930's and 40's that transformed this nation and its role in the world.
The idea is to engross them in reading about something they're already obsessed with, but not to treat reading materials as sub-par to other formats.
Pundits have complained that Broken Embraces just retreads the director's old ideas; I see it more as variations on a theme – familiar, but still engrossing.
Not that fans of the show would complain: the bad ideas are Shark Tank's more engrossing bits.
Engrossing, elusive and packed to its literal limits with ideas at 79 minutes, "The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint" beautifully takes Akinmusire's distinctive tone to new realms, including slow-burning orchestral swells and convention-defying vocal collaborations that attempt to translate his vision into words.
Tunnel 228 Waterloo, London SE1 Brighton Festival Various venues Cyrano de Bergerac Chichester In the past five years, no company has done more to expand the idea of what theatre can do than the engrossing, meticulous, shrewdly secretive and constantly changing Punchdrunk.
It's part Gothic, part kaleidoscopic novel of ideas, part lurid celebrity potboiler, and it is seldom less than engrossing.
