book reviews and features
Susan Finlay: The Lives of the Artists review - the knotted threads of memoir and art
Wednesday, 17 May 2023
Benvenuto Cellini’s My Life (1728) is not the artist-biography to which Susan Finlay’s The Lives of the Artists pays its most obvious homage, but it appears to have followed its... Read more... |
Glory to Sound: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Brighton Festival 2023 review - a reggae rebel's life in music
Monday, 15 May 2023
Straight-backed at 70, Linton Kwesi Johnson wears the smart garb of a British Caribbean elder – trilby, cream jacket, West Indies maroon jumper and tie, grey trousers, blue socks and grey shoes.... Read more... |
Keggie Carew: Beastly review - the history of animals and us
Monday, 15 May 2023
There’s been an avalanche of books about animals and trees. The more species disappear and forests are felled, the more titles are published: laments, celebrations, extinction alarms and rhapsodic... Read more... |
Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapes
Tuesday, 09 May 2023
On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored... Read more... |
A. Anatoli: Babi Yar - The Story of Ukraine's Holocaust review - a masterpiece uncensored
Friday, 05 May 2023
The great Russian novelists of the 19th century wrote what Henry James called "large, loose, baggy monsters" out of belief that "truth" was... Read more... |
Max Porter: Shy review - an ode to boyhood and rage
Wednesday, 03 May 2023
Max Porter continues his fascination with the struggles of youth in his newest release, Shy: his most beautifully-wrought... Read more... |
Solmaz Sharif: Customs review - a poetics of exile and return
Monday, 01 May 2023
The language of poetic technique is perhaps weighted towards rupture, rather than reparation: lines end and break, we count beats and stress, experience caesurae (literally ‘cuttings’), and mark... Read more... |
First Person: Sophie Haydock on going beyond the grave
Thursday, 27 April 2023
It was a cold day in Vienna when Egon Schiele was buried in the Ober-Sankt-Veit cemetery. He was just 28 years old. The controversial... Read more... |
Lydia Sandgren: Collected Works review - the mysteries that surround us all
Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it... Read more... |
Jonathan Kennedy: Pathogenesis - How Germs Made History review - a return to the infections that formed us
Friday, 14 April 2023
The Cayapo tribe, a shade under 10,000 strong, lived in South America unacquainted with humans in the wider world until 1903. That year, they accepted a missionary who, along with news of... Read more... |
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Small-scale shows, nurtured in offbeat places, are becoming all the rage in the...
Queyras, Philharmonia, Suzuki, RFH review - Romantic journey...
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Masaaki Suzuki has not just travelled into pastures new but proved himself thoroughly at home in them. The...
Nadine Shah, SWG3, Glasgow review - loudly dancing the night...
First Nadine Shah raised hopes, then dashed them. “I’ve never had a dance off onstage before,” she observed at one point, impressed by the shapes...
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, Tate M...
In 1903, Wassily Kandinsky painted a figure in a blue cloak galloping across a landscape on a white horse. Several years later the name of the...
Blu-ray: The Dreamers
Isabelle (Eva Green) leans over, her long hair catches fire from a candle, and Matthew (Michael Pitt) devotedly snuffs it out. She doesn’t miss a...
Orbital, O2 Institute, Birmingham review - the techno titans...
On Friday evening, dance veterans Orbital touched down in Birmingham to celebrate two of the most significant and acclaimed albums in...
Fern Brady, Netflix Special review - sex, relationships and...
An appearance on Taskmaster and the publication of her acclaimed memoir Strong Female Character have helped propel Fern Brady...