thu 30/10/2025

book reviews and features

Richard Schoch: Shakespeare's House review - nothing ill in such a temple

Lia Rockey

Richard Schoch, in the subtitle of his new book on Shakespeare’s House, promises something big: “a window onto his life and legacy.” To the disgruntled reader – pushed to the brink...

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Richard Dorment: Warhol After Warhol review - beyond criticism

Alice Brewer

2023 was a good year for Andy Warhol post-mortems: after Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, after...

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Best of 2023: Books

theartsdesk

From wandering Rachmaninoff to Ulysses tribute, or a poet’s boyhood in Dundee to sleeplessness and arboreal inner lives, our reviewers share their literary picks from 2023.

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First Person: novelist Pip Adam on the sound of injustice

Pip Adam

I know it rattles me, so I try to prepare for it. But I am never fully prepared for the noise.

The correctional facilities I have visited over the last 30 years are noisy places. A secure...

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Angela Leighton: Something, I Forget review - the art of letting go

Hugh Barnes

Half way through Something, I Forget, in a poem entitled “Returns”, and subtitled “Invasion of Ukraine,...

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Mathias Énard: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild review - a man of infinite death

Issy Brooks-Ward

"Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief", wrote Amy Levy, "it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for...

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Anne Michaels: Held review - one story across time

Lucy Thynne

Near the end of My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s prize-winning 2016 novel, a creative writing teacher tells Lucy, ‘you will...

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Ishion Hutchinson: School of Instructions review - learning against estrangement

Leila Greening

School of Instructions, a book-length poem composed of six sections, is a virtuosic dance between memory...

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Jesse Darling: Virgins review - going straight

Alice Brewer

Self-described ‘intermittent poet’ and 2023 Turner Prize-nominee Jesse Darling said this in a recent interview for Art Review: ‘I...

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Justin Lewis: Don't Stop the Music - A History of Pop Music, One Day at a Time review - deft and delightful pop almanac

Bernard Hughes

This splendid book proves that trivia need not be trivial, and that a miscellany of apparently disconnected facts can cohere, if done well. It is in the proud lineage of the “toilet book”, a form...

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