book reviews and features
Oliver Craske: Indian Sun, The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar review - a master receives masterly treatment
Thursday, 02 April 2020
Ravi Shankar was one of the giants of 20th century music. A... Read more... |
Fitzcarraldo Editions wins Republic of Consciousness Prize
Tuesday, 31 March 2020
South London-based publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has once more been awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize,... Read more... |
Sam Bourne: To Kill a Man review – the woman who fought back
Sunday, 29 March 2020
Assassinate the President! Obliterate history by torching libraries and murdering historians! Crazy leaders and fake news are just a few of the subjects tackled by political journalist and... Read more... |
Nathalie Léger: The White Dress review – masterfully introverted
Sunday, 22 March 2020
Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator... Read more... |
Samuel Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women review – the literary titan laid bare
Sunday, 22 March 2020
That any writer “struggling to make ends meet” would apply themselves to the making of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is something of a complexity. Written in ... Read more... |
Brendan Cleary, Great Eastern, Brighton review – last orders
Thursday, 19 March 2020
St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But... Read more... |
Christopher Booker: Groupthink review – an uncritical history of political correctness
Sunday, 15 March 2020
“Groupthink”, according to Christopher Booker, is “one of the most valuable guides to collective human behaviour we have ever been given.” But what is it exactly? It begins Booker’s final,... Read more... |
Emma Glass: Rest and Be Thankful review – fiction from the paediatric front-line
Sunday, 15 March 2020
How do you prevent a sick baby in a high-care cubicle, his frail chest swamped in secretions, from drowning in his own “loose mucus”? Remove a suction catheter from its wrapping and insert it... Read more... |
Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs review - a book of two halves
Sunday, 15 March 2020
Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a true novel of two halves and is (excuse the pun) a bit of a curate’s egg. Kawakami’s bio at the beginning of the text explains that the novel was... Read more... |
Hilary Fannin: The Weight of Love review – unravelling knotty lives
Sunday, 15 March 2020
The relationship between Joe, Robin and Ruth is far from your average love triangle. On the face of it, Robin loves Ruth, but after introducing her to his charismatic friend Joe – an artist and... Read more... |
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One Man, Two Guvnors, National Theatre at Home review – blis...
Armchair theatre-lovers rejoice. During the lockdown, the...
Album: Pokey LaFarge, Rock Bottom Rhapsody - a gourmet gumbo
Talk about a great big melting pot! The eighth studio album by the man born 36 ago as Andrew Heissler in Bloomington, Indiana, and known to the...
Lazy Susan, Soho Theatre On Demand review - sketch duo'...
You may have seen Lazy Susan's excellent BBC pilot last year; now a series has been commissioned from Freya Parker and Celeste Dring so we can...
ReMastered: Tricky Dicky and the Man in Black, Netflix revie...
Netflix’s ReMastered series is one of the streaming channel’s undersung gems. Launching in 2018, when Tricky Dick and the Man in...
The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, OperaVision review - cla...
Feeling stir-crazy right now? Imagine being confined to one room with a half-crazed housekeeper, two dysfunctional kids and two increasingly...
Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema, BBC Four review - the...
Mirrors and windows, looking at ourselves or out into the world, reflecting the culture or making it: compare and contrast. This was the...
Album: Ren Harvieu - Revel In The Drama
Filmic. Lushness balanced with intimacy. Ren Harvieu’s follow-up to 2012’s Top Five Through The Night is crammed with wide-screen aural...
Wild, Hampstead Theatre online review - timelier than antici...
“The whole world is just tilting at the moment,” we’re told near the end of Wild, the Mike Bartlett play from summer 2016 that is...