book reviews and features
Loving Highsmith review - documentary focused on the writer's lighter side
Thursday, 13 April 2023
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this... Read more... |
Diana Evans: A House for Alice review - lyrical sequel to Ordinary People
Tuesday, 04 April 2023
Diana Evans specialises in houses, their baleful quirks and the meaning of home. In her acclaimed third novel, Ordinary People (2018), formerly happy, black couple Melissa and Michael... Read more... |
Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinking
Saturday, 01 April 2023
In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the... Read more... |
Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save us
Tuesday, 28 March 2023
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat. Lecturing a teenage coven on the art... Read more... |
Margaret Atwood: Old Babes in the Wood review - bookending the short story
Tuesday, 14 March 2023
Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book... Read more... |
Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history
Saturday, 11 March 2023
For almost half a century, from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021, Janet Malcolm was a staff writer on the New Yorker where her meticulous reporting and provocatively strong opinions... Read more... |
Nicole Flattery: Nothing Special review - returning to the Factory
Wednesday, 08 March 2023
It seems that Andy Warhol’s Factory – silver-dusted and populated with tragic, drug-addicted minor... Read more... |
Will Harris: Brother Poem review - writing the poems that could have been
Saturday, 04 March 2023
You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-... Read more... |
Disbelief - 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (ed. Julia Nemirovskaya) review - writing battle-lines
Thursday, 23 February 2023
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world... Read more... |
Sally Adee: We Are Electric review - currents that run through us all
Friday, 17 February 2023
All the things going on with me as I type this – fingers moving keys, eye and brain registering characters on my screen, thoughts that will (I hope) generate the next lot of characters – rely on... Read more... |
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latest in today
Minority Report, Lyric Hammersmith Theatre review - ill-judg...
Towards the end of David Haig’s new adaptation of Philip...
Mitski, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - cool and quirky, yet...
It was her 2018 album Be the Cowboy which saw Mitski propelled to stardom status. Laurel Hell, which followed in 2022...
Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York), Criterion Thea...
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...