book reviews and features
Ed Vulliamy: When Words Fail review - the band plays on
Sunday, 23 December 2018
If you're seeking ideas for new playlists and diverse suggestions for reading - and when better to look than at this time of year? - then beware: you may be overwhelmed by the infectious... Read more... |
Boris Akunin: Black City review - a novel to sharpen the wits
Sunday, 16 December 2018
It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin,... Read more... |
Global fiction: the pick of 2018
Sunday, 09 December 2018
If you believe the bulk of the “books of the year” features that drift like stray tinsel across the media at this time of year, Britain’s literary taste-makers only enjoy the flavours of the... Read more... |
Matthew Dennison: Eternal Boy review – the banker who stayed forever young
Sunday, 25 November 2018
In Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time, a high-powered publisher and politician named Charles Darke quits his posts, regresses to a child-like state, and frolics in the woods like a... Read more... |
Daša Drndić: Belladonna review - a tragicomic journey into Europe's darkness
Sunday, 18 November 2018
Daša Drndić, the Croatian author who died in June aged 71, has posthumously won the second Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her coruscating novel Belladonna. The award, set up... Read more... |
Dramatic Exchanges review - a brilliant slice of theatre history
Sunday, 11 November 2018
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between... Read more... |
Michael Connelly: Dark Sacred Night review - a pairing of loner detectives
Sunday, 04 November 2018
The master of the Southern California... Read more... |
Michael Caine: Blowing the Bloody Doors Off review - an actor's handbook, annotated by experience
Sunday, 28 October 2018
What a charmer! An irresistible combination of diffidence and confidence, Michael Caine is so much more than Alfie... Read more... |
Julian Baggini: How the World Thinks review - a whirlwind tour of ideas
Sunday, 21 October 2018
The intrepid philosopher Julian Baggini has travelled the world, going to academic conferences, interviewing scores of practicing philosophers from academics to gurus, trying to figure out and pin... Read more... |
Barbara Kingsolver: Unsheltered review - too many issues
Sunday, 14 October 2018
“When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century botanist who is one of the characters in... Read more... |
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latest in today
London Tide, National Theatre review - haunting moody river...
“He do the police in different voices.” If ever one phrase summed up a work of fiction, and the art of its writer, then surely it is this...
Watts, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Bignamini, Barbica...
Anyone who’d booked to hear soprano Sally Matthews or to witness the rapid progress of conductor Daniele Rustioni – the initial draw for me –...
The Songs of Joni Mitchell, Roundhouse review - fans (old an...
For most people’s 40th birthday celebrations, they might get a few...
Fantastic Machine review - photography's story from one...
The first photograph was taken nearly 200 years ago in France by Joseph Niépce, and the first picture of a person was taken in Paris by Louis...
Album: Taylor Swift - The Tortured Poets Department: The Ant...
Taylor Swift’s unfathomable ability to articulate human emotion shines as brightly as ever in her latest double album The Tortured Poets...
Jonathan Pie, Duke of York's Theatre review - spoof pol...
If you don't like sweary comics – Jonathan Pie uses the c-word liberally – then this may not be the show for you. In fact if you're a Tory, ditto...
Baby Reindeer, Netflix review - a misery memoir disturbingly...
Richard Gadd won an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2016 with...
Machinal, The Old Vic review - note-perfect pity and terror
Virtuosity and a wildly beating heart are compatible in Richard Jones’s finely calibrated production of Renaissance woman Sophie Treadwell’s ...
Simon Boccanegra, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester...
If ever more evidence were needed of Sir Mark Elder’s untiring zest for exploration and love of the thrill of live opera performance, it was this...
All You Need Is Death review - a future folk horror classic
Music, when the singer’s voice dies away, vibrates in the memory. In the hypnotic new Irish horror film All You Need Is Death, those who...