book reviews and features
Frans de Waal: Mama's Last Hug review - animal feelings
Sunday, 14 April 2019
Primatologist, ethologist, zoologist, biologist, social psychologist, behaviourist – how may ‘ists’ can one person have? Dutch-American... Read more... |
My Enemy's Cherry Tree: Wang Ting-Kuo review - a masterpiece from Taiwan
Sunday, 07 April 2019
Early every evening, Miss Baixiu comes to sit in an isolated café. She is the daughter of Luo Yiming, the respected employee of a successful commercial bank in charge of loans throughout central... Read more... |
Ali Smith: Spring review – green shoots, dark fears
Sunday, 31 March 2019
Stopped in the street for a vox pop by a BBC interviewer keen to “fill your air” with strife and bile, a character in Spring retorts that “there’s a world out there bigger than Brexit,... Read more... |
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... |
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latest in today
Ridout, Włoszczowska, Crawford, Lai, Posner, Wigmore Hall re...
Advice to young musicians, as given at several “how to market your career” seminars: don’t begin a biography with “one of the finest xxxs of his/...
Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a mu...
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s ...
Album: Mdou Moctar - Funeral for Justice
Despite its title, Mdou Moctar’s new album is no slow-paced mournful dirge. In fact, it is louder, faster and more overtly political than any of...
Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...
Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - ench...
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital...
Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review -...
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world –...
DVD/Blu-Ray: Priscilla
There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just...
Špaček, BBC Philharmonic, Bihlmaier, Bridgewater Hall, Manch...
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming...
Banging Denmark, Finborough Theatre review - lively but conf...
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided his best means of...
Album: Fred Hersch - Silent, Listening
The previous solo piano solo album from Fred Hersch, one of the world’s great...