She just pertly scolds the star, while Kombou is as isolated and pampered – his numbers, all solos, make Jailhouse Rock feel less like a book show than an interrupted concert; only once does Vince use a song to express the emotion of the moment, and then he’s alone.The evening ends with a singalong whose final tune is sung not by Kombou but by Gilz Terera, a black actor who plays another singing prisoner. This may seem odd dramatically, but it was the only way to raise the tone from phlegm to frenzy. For Terera has the charisma and the musicality (and the musculature) that Kombou lacks. When Terera unreels his Little Richard antics, the joint really jumps.

Otherwise, Jailhouse Rock is a case of “Awopbopaloobop-awopbamthud.”. A globally acclaimed novel about the myths and memories of the Spanish Civil War has won this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction prize. The prize, supported by The Independent, Arts Council England and Champagne Taittinger, is divided equally between Cercas and his English translator, Anne McLean.Soldiers of Salamis (published by Bloomsbury) is a moving but high-spirited novel of war, memory and forgetting, and a quest for the real meaning of courage and heroism. It tells the story of a young writer in modern Spain who accidentally stumbles across a strange “true tale” from the end of the civil war in 1939. The narrator, called “Javier Cercas” but very much a fictional creation, discovers that one of Franco’s tame intellectuals, a vain and pompous aesthete, escaped from a Republican firing squad in the forests outside Barcelona thanks to a mysterious act of mercy by an unknown militiaman.The novel traces the history of this lucky Francoist crony, Rafael S?hez Mazas, who really existed.

Then, in a coda set in the present day, it goes in search of the very different kind of warrior who saved him from certain death. With a consistently light touch, and flashes of humour even in its darkest moments, Soldiers of Salamis reflects both on the lingering tragedy of Spain’s civil war and the filtration of its actual events through memory and propaganda in later times.The novel has sold more than 500,000 copies around the world. A film version by David Truebagained a best-picture nomination for this year’s Goyas, Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars, and won the award for best cinematography.Born in 1962, Javier Cercas is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Since 1989, he has lectured in Spanish literature at the University of Gerona in Catalonia.

Also on the shortlist were Welcome to Paradise by Mahi Binebine (Granta); Q by Luther Blissett (Heinemann); Lizard Tails by Juan Marse (Harvill); Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia (Granta); and Mrs Sartoris by Elke Schmitter (Faber & Faber). The judges were Sian Williams, Marina Warner, Boyd Tonkin and George Szirtes.. More than 200 Labour MPs yesterday demanded the reintroduction of legislation to ban fox hunting, stepping up pressure on the Government to outlaw the sport by the autumn. It could then become law by the end of the parliamentary session in October because more than a year has passed since the Commons gave the Bill a second reading in December 2002, allowing the Commons to override objections from the Lords under the Parliament Act.The Countryside Alliance warned of a campaign of civil disobedience if the ban became law. Tim Bonner, a spokesman for the pro-hunt group, warned: “There will be a very serious campaign of civil disobedience on this. We’ve already seen one old lady in Devon protesting about council tax rises and we have put 400,000 people on the streets of London.”If the government presses ahead, many thousands of those people will be willing to campaign against it.”The backbench MPs are going to end up making the Government look ridiculous Voters are not interested in hunting. What they are concentrating on in the run up to the general election is delivery on health, education and immigration.