When chat shows were worth watching

The Dick Cavett Show, a staple of US TV in the 1960s and 1970s, is a reminder of a time when the chat show was about considerably more than celebrities pushing their latest product. Cavett is disarmingly brilliant at teasing out frankness from his often stellar array of unguarded interviewees, though he never had to try too hard to extract gems from the mouth of Orson Welles. In this clip, the cigar-chomping auteur and peerless raconteur recounts his encounters with, astonishingly, Churchill and Hitler.

Love and longing in Istanbul

On a recent trip to Istanbul I visited the Masumiyet Müzesi, the Museum of Innocence, inspired by the 2008 novel of the same name by the Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. There are few other literary works that detail with such relish and acuity the fundamentals of love, longing, paths not taken, compromise and conflict. It is an evocative love letter, too, to the great city on the Bosphorus that straddles Europe and Asia – richly detailed in the museum’s collection of Pamuk’s photographs – with all the tensions that entails. A dazzling work.

Richard Strauss’ redemption

The final years of the German composer Richard Strauss, morally compromised by Nazism, saw him reach remarkable artistic heights born of the desire for redemption. The Four Last Songs and Metamorphosen are well known. His final opera, Capriccio, premiered in 1942, with a libretto by the even more compromised conductor Clemens Krauss, is less popular, but remains one of the great chamber operas: a profound, lyrical meditation on the battle between music and poetry. That it manages to combine the two so brilliantly is just one of its many ironies. Georges Prêtre conducts with the appropriate grace.