sat 07/06/2025

book reviews and features

theartsdesk Q&A: Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave, authors of 'Can Music Make You Sick?'

joe Muggs

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking...

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Book extract: Snake by Erica Wright

theartsdesk

Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes,...

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Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmith

Matt Wolf

"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard,...

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William Boyd: Trio review - private perils in 1968

Charlie Stone

William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and...

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John Lanchester: Reality, and Other Stories review - campfire spooks for the digital age

Lydia Bunt

What do you do when your phone rings, but you know the person ringing isn’t alive? In many ways, the cleverly named Reality, and Other Stories is a collection of...

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Bob Woodward: Rage review - terror and tyranny in the White House

Liz Thomson

“Build the wall!” exhorted Trump, at rally after rally back in the days when we’d all acknowledged his moral repugnancy but still believed he could never attain the presidency. And Trump has...

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Ottessa Moshfegh: Death in Her Hands review - a case of murder mind

Olivia Fletcher

Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises...

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Sudhir Hazareesingh: Black Spartacus review – the life, and thought, of the first black super-hero

Boyd Tonkin

The former slave, and coachman on a sugar plantation, began one of his early public proclamations in a typically defiant vein: “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name.” At that...

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Ian Williams: Reproduction review - a dazzling kaleidoscope of life's tragicomedy

Daniel Lewis

Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has...

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Emma Cline: Daddy review - scintillating short stories by the author of The Girls

Markie Robson-Scott

The Girls, Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel of 2016, was billed as a story based on the Manson murders. But in fact, like some of the stories in Daddy, her new short-story...

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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

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While the Gallagher brothers scrabble around in the dirt for their rich pickings, an altogether more...

Goebbels and the Führer review - behind the scenes from the...

“Do you know the name of the propaganda minister of England, or America, or even Stalin? No. But Joseph Goebbels? Everyone knows him.” The cynical...

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It’s always a risk when a production changes venue. In the curious alchemy of live performance, no-one can be sure whether a shift in surroundings...

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