Front Row

New film The Birth of a Nation takes the title from DW Griffith's 1915 silent film but not much else. Directed by and starring Nate Parker, it tells the true story of an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. Ashley Clarke reviews.Poet Ruth Padel discusses her latest book Tidings, a narrative Christmas poem about a little girl, a homeless man and a fox. It takes the reader all around the world, from St Pancras churchyard in London to Bethlehem, Australia and New York. Joan Eardley's painting career lasted only 15 years but, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, her work gets more requests than Picasso. The gallery's curator Patrick Elliott discusses a new exhibition of her work alongside composer Helen Grime, whose composition Snow is inspired by Eardley's paintings. In the spring of 1995, actor Mark Lockyer was playing Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet for the Royal Shakespeare Company when he was overcome with anxiety, fear and paranoia. It was the start of a bipolar attack. Now he has turned t