This week the panel discussed:
Damien Hirst
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...he's flogging a dead cow.
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The artist Damien Hirst's artistic career was begun by the tiger shark he preserved in a tank of formaldehyde in 1991 under the title: The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living.
Since then, Hirst has worked variously with sheep, spots and swirls, won the Turner Prize but suffered difficulties with drugs and drink which partly explain the eight-year gap between his last major London show and the one which opened this week.
Always interested in all creatures great and small, Hirst has now gone a step higher and taken on God in both art and literary
The Damien Hirst show is at the White Cube gallery in London until 19 October.
Democracy
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This is a magnificent play.
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Michael Frayn's last play was the international hit Copenhagen and his last novel was the Whitbread-winning Spies.
In his new drama - which opened at the National Theatre this week - Frayn continues with espionage as a subject but shifts geographically from Denmark to Bonn at the turn of the 1970s.
Frayn's play Democracy dramatises the true story of how - at the exact time that Watergate was happening in America - Germany was enduring its own farcical scandal of political eavesdropping. West German Chancellor Willy Brandt had hired as an aide, Gunter Guillame, who was, in fact, a spy for the East German secret police.
Democracy continues at the National Theatre in London.
The Italian Job
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I didn't like it at all. I thought it was something Captain Beefheart sung by S Club Juniors.
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Noel Coward starred with Michael Caine in the 1969 original of the movie The Italian Job, about a bullion robbery taking place during a Turin traffic jam.
One piece of dialogue - Caine's 'you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!' - ranks high in polls of all-time movie one-liners.
But now - because the movie industry is almost as prone to copy-cats as the robbery business - The Italian Job has been re-made and relocated to Los Angeles.
The Italian Job opens around the UK 19 September.
My Life as a Fake
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...a lovely idea, but I don't think he knew how to continue that through to the end.
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The Australian novelist Peter Carey forms - with the South African author J.M Coetzee - a select literary club of writers who have won the Booker Prize twice.
Carey's victorious stories were Oscar And Lucinda and - two years ago - True History Of The Kelly Gang in which he recreated the most famous outlaw of his native country: Ned Kelly.
Carey's new novel - My Life as a Fake - is another true Australian story: this time about a literary renegade.
In 1944, a literary magazine published poems attributed to Ern Malley: a sort of TS Eliot of Sydney. These later turned out to be hoaxes - a joke against modernist pretension - but embarrassment was followed by scandal as the editor of the magazine was tried for obscenity.
Carey uses the real poems and court-room transcripts but imagined characters.
My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey is published in hardback.
The panel were:
Newsnight Review, BBC Two's weekly cultural round-up, follows Newsnight on Friday evenings at 2300 BST, 2200 GMT.
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