mon 01/09/2025

book reviews and features

Judith Herrin: Ravenna review - flashes of order and beauty in a chaotic world

David Nice

Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the...

Read more...

Jenny Hval: Girls Against God review - a sticky dance through space and time

India Lewis

Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy...

Read more...

10 Questions for Poet and Critic Rebecca Tamás

Jessica Payn

Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "...

Read more...

The Secret History of My Library: Essay by Daniel Saldaña París

Daniel Saldaña Paris

Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible...

Read more...

Dolly Alderton: Ghosts review - a love story beyond romance

India Lewis

There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely...

Read more...

Richard J Evans: The Hitler Conspiracies review – Nazi myths debunked

Boyd Tonkin

In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave, authors of 'Can Music Make You Sick?'

joe Muggs

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking...

Read more...

Book extract: Snake by Erica Wright

theartsdesk

Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes,...

Read more...

Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmith

Matt Wolf

"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard,...

Read more...

William Boyd: Trio review - private perils in 1968

Charlie Stone

William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and...

Read more...

Pages

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

The future of Arts Journalism

 

You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!

We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £49,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d

And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.

 

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
BBC Proms: Barruk, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Kuusisto rev...

Every year, the Royal Albert Hall proves complicit in the magic of the quietest utterances if, as Barenboim put it, you let the audience come to...

BBC Proms: Alexander’s Feast, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Whela...

Many Londoners would already have experienced the musicality incarnate of Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra. A smaller ensemble rocked...

Album: Brad Mehldau - Ride into the Sun

Brad Mehldau’s three trio concerts in the UK in June showed what it is he does so brilliantly. The group (with bassist Felix Moseholm and drummer...

Music Reissues Weekly: The Outer Limits - Just One More Chan...

The Outer Limits were from Leeds. Active over 1965 to 1968, the...

BBC Proms: Moore, LSO, Bancroft review - the freshness of mo...

11am concerts do take some getting used to. The BBC Proms season has no fewer than...

Willis-Sørensen, Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, Wilson, Cadoga...

This week Vladimir Putin tried to murder my hosts in Ukraine. He failed. In more hopeful days, I spoke at a seminar organised by the British...

Interview, Riverside Studios review - old media vs new in sp...

The cult film that director Theo van Gogh left behind when he was killed in 2004, Interview, has already been remade twice;...

theartsdesk Radio Show 37 - Pete Lawrence of the Big Chill d...

This edition of Peter Culshaw’s peripatetic...

Album: Sabrina Carpenter - Man's Best Friend

Following the success of 2024’s flirtatious Short n’ Sweet, Sabrina Carpenter has fully committed to her pin-up popstar status with ...

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters