Another catch-up dozen

John Wyver writes: My schedule is all over the place, disrupted by family issues and other commitments. But here is a collection of interesting articles and more that I might have contributed last Sunday, and which I hope will get me back to posting more regularly. My somewhat seasonal and socialist realist image is ‘Grain for the State’, 1953, by Viktor Karrus, seen recently in the collection of KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn. • Anthologized: the world of W. Somerset Maugham on-screen: for Criterion’s Current, Farran Smith Nehme writes about the under-appreciated Gainsborough films Quartet (1948) and Trio (1950). • The moment of Trevor Griffiths’ Comedians: when jokes became lead pellets: marking the fiftieth anniversary of Griffiths’ great drama, Stephen Wagg contributes a short post on ‘ the decline of a shared national comedy culture, and the growing influence of comedians in shaping political and social conversations’. • Nonpredictive texts: for LA Review of Books, Elizabeth Alsop is…