book reviews and features
Karl Ove Knausgaard: So Much Longing in So Little Space review – smiles more than screams
Sunday, 24 March 2019
Around the works canteen, a dozen huge wall-paintings depict, in bright cheerful colours spread across radically stylised forms, happy scenes of women and men at work and play beside a sunlit sea... Read more... |
David Hepworth: A Fabulous Creation review - how vinyl soothed our souls and defined our being
Sunday, 17 March 2019
Record Store Day is now a fixture on the calendar, a key element in “the vinyl revival”, and this year – 13 April –... Read more... |
Fiona MacCarthy: Walter Gropius review - a master of modernism
Sunday, 10 March 2019
The centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus (literally, “Building House”) art school is on us, prompting publications and exhibitions worldwide. Subtitled “Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus”,... Read more... |
Robert Menasse: The Capital review - much more than just an EU satire
Sunday, 10 March 2019
Forty years ago this July, Simone Veil gave her inaugural speech as first President of the European Parliament. She had many issues to include. Peace came first; as a survivor of Auschwitz and the... Read more... |
Sadie Jones: The Snakes review - lacking feeling
Sunday, 03 March 2019
Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist;... Read more... |
George Szirtes: The Photographer at Sixteen review – how grief becomes art
Sunday, 24 February 2019
How long does it take for grief to crystallise into art? No timetable can ever set that date. The poet George Szirtes’s mother took her own life, after previous attempts, during the hot summer of... Read more... |
Sam Bourne: To Kill the Truth review - taut thriller of big ideas
Sunday, 24 February 2019
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways... Read more... |
Richard J Evans: Eric Hobsbawm - A Life in History review - mesmerisingly readable
Sunday, 17 February 2019
This is an astonishing book: in its breadth, depth and detail and also in its almost palpable, and sometimes unpalatable, admiration of its... Read more... |
Tana French: The Wych Elm review - a lucky man and his downfall
Sunday, 17 February 2019
A Tana French crime novel is never just a thriller. Probably more acclaimed in the USA than the UK (she gets rave reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times) French always... Read more... |
Jill Abramson: Merchants of Truth review - news in the age of digital disruption
Sunday, 10 February 2019
It’s more than a little ironic when journalists who grew up in the upstart world of digital media, with all its mash-ups, plagiarism and (yes) theft, accuse a print journalist with a distinguished... Read more... |
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latest in today
The Beast review - bad cop blues
“They say we all have a beast locked up inside of us,” a character observes early in this...
Gators, Tramp Productions online review – the glittering dar...
She’s an ordinary young woman, and she really doesn’t know what to think. After all, things are way out of control. She knows that the natural...
ZZ Top: That Little Ol' Band From Texas, Netflix review...
ZZ Top always seemed like a Texan version of Status Quo. It turns out, from watching this entertaining but hardly revelatory documentary, that...
Remembering John Prine, one of the great American singer-son...
John Prine, who has died at the age of 73 from a Covid 19-...
Wonderland, Hampstead Theatre online review - a major play a...
The talk is of an “economy in ruin [with] unemployment through the roof”: a précis of Britain in lockdown? In fact, this is one of the many eerily...
Joe Boyd's Recording Heaven
When it comes to making records, I love deadlines. Embarking on an open-ended project, particularly with the infinite number of overdubs made...
The Rake's Progress, Complicité online review - well-pr...
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration...
Mark Townsend: No Return review - a masterclass in journalis...
When Amer Deghayes departed for Syria in a truck leaving from Birmingham, a worker from a youth arts organisation in Brighton had been trying to...
Return to Belsen, ITV review - Jonathan Dimbleby retraces hi...
When the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany was liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division on 15 April...
The Iron Mask review - preposterous multi-national fantasy
Director Oleg Stepchenko’s follow-up to his 2014...