book reviews and features
Lisa Kaltenegger: Alien Earths review - a whole new worldThursday, 18 April 2024
Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also suns a little while back, cosmically speaking, or a... Read more... |
Heather McCalden: The Observable Universe review - reflections from a damaged lifeTuesday, 16 April 2024
Artist and writer, Heather McCalden, has produced her first book-length work. The Observable Universe examines, variously, her familial history, the death of her parents to AIDS, and the... Read more... |
Dorian Lynskey: Everything Must Go review - it's the end of the world as we know itWednesday, 10 April 2024
According to REM in 1987, “It’s the end of the world as we know it”. And while they sang about topical preoccupations – hurricanes, wildfires and plane crashes – they were really just varying a... Read more... |
Andrew O'Hagan: Caledonian Road review - London's Dickensian returnTuesday, 02 April 2024
Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, Caledonian Road, feels very much intended to be an epic, or at the very... Read more... |
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... 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... 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... 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... 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... 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... Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
The Book of Clarence comes lumbered with the charge of being the new Life of Brian, an irreverent spoof of the life...
Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also...
All three works in the second of this week’s Neville Marriner centenary concerts from the ensemble he founded vindicated their intention to reign...
One can often be made to feel old in the theatre. A hot take in a snappy 90 minutes (with video!) on the latest Gen Z obsession (...
For tonight’s performance at Milton Court, the nuanced and delicate tones of strings, voices, harmonium and chamber organ will merge...
Death Songbook is, says Charles Hazlewood, founder, artistic director and conductor of Paraorchestra, an album of “music which is about...
Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling...
I’ve never been one for school reunions, but even if I had kept in touch with former classmates I think that American...