Books
Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War: A Scenario review - on the inconceivableFriday, 29 March 2024
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to change, unimaginably, as the city was blitzed by the airburst of the first atomic bomb, nicknamed Little... Read more... |
Anna Reid: A Nasty Little War - The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution review - home truthsFriday, 01 March 2024
During the Cold War, US presidents often claimed that the West and the Soviet Union had never fought one another directly. This observation made sense geopolitically – the likelihood of mutually assured destruction made a nuclear conflict seem... Read more... |
Tom Chatfield: Wise Animals review - on the changing worldThursday, 22 February 2024
Consider a chimp peeling a stick which it will poke into a termite nest. It strikes us as a human gesture. Our primate cousin is fashioning a tool. Just as important, the peeled stick implies a narrative. Chimp is hungry, will deploy this neat aid... Read more... |
Sheila Heti: Alphabetical Diaries review - an A-Z of inner lifeTuesday, 20 February 2024
After a first read of the blurb for Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, you might be forgiven for assuming that this is merely a gimmick.The book does what it says on the tin: each "chapter" begins with the next letter of the alphabet, with the... Read more... |
David Harsent: Skin review - our strange surfacesSaturday, 17 February 2024
David Harsent has won a lot of prizes. From the Eric Gregory to the T. S. Eliot, he has carved out a literary career positively glittering with awards and nominations, and keeps the kind of trophy cabinet that would turn many of his contemporaries... Read more... |
Brian Klaas: Fluke review - why things happen, and can we stop them?Saturday, 27 January 2024
One day in the early 90s I accepted the offer of a lift from a friend to a university open day I hadn’t been planning to go to. I ended up attending that university and there met my wife, and if I hadn’t done that my life would have been very... Read more... |
Richard Schoch: Shakespeare's House review - nothing ill in such a templeThursday, 25 January 2024
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 by one too many new books on Shakespeare, each nervously... Read more... |
Richard Dorment: Warhol After Warhol review - beyond criticismTuesday, 09 January 2024
2023 was a good year for Andy Warhol post-mortems: after Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, after Alexandra Auder’s Don’t Call Home, Richard Dorment’s Warhol After Warhol.Their publication journeys undoubtedly benefitted from the value Anglophone... Read more... |
Best of 2023: BooksSunday, 31 December 2023
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.Prototype Press continues to publish much of the most interesting British... Read more... |
First Person: novelist Pip Adam on the sound of injusticeWednesday, 20 December 2023
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 building requires strong doors that are opened and shut –... Read more... |
Angela Leighton: Something, I Forget review - the art of letting goMonday, 18 December 2023
Half way through Something, I Forget, in a poem entitled “Returns”, and subtitled “Invasion of Ukraine, February 2022”, Angela Leighton writes, “Today’s my birthday. Many happy returns. / Elsewhere there’s shot, mortar shells, grenades.”The... Read more... |
Mathias Énard: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild review - a man of infinite deathSaturday, 09 December 2023
"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 death, like love, is ever old and ever new". In Mathias... Read more... |
