Based on Victorien Sardou’s 1887 French-language play, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca of 1900, with a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, not only occurs in a specific time and place, but on a precise date that can be linked to an historical event. All of the action takes place during the afternoon, evening and early morning of 17 and 18 June 1800, following the Battle of Marengo between Napoleon’s army and Austrian forces. The Austrians were initially...

It is exactly one hundred years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. It received generally positive reviews, but some critics felt it compared unfavourably with his previous novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), and it was not a great commercial success. In fact, when Fitzgerald died in 1940 he believed himself to be a failure and that his work would soon be forgotten. However, during World War II the Council on...