wed 24/09/2025

book reviews and features

theartsdesk Q&A: Günter Grass

Kate Connolly

The Nobel prize-winning writer, playwright and artist Günter Grass was arguably the best-known German-language author of the second half of the 20th century. Kate Connolly met him in May 2010 in...

Read more...

theartsdesk at the Port Eliot Festival

Mark Hudson

Remember when festivals were only about what they were ostensibly about? When, say, Reading offered nothing beyond hard rock bar disgusting toilets, overpriced hamburgers and the prospect of a...

Read more...

Extracts: John Tusa - Pain in the Arts

Ismene Brown

In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Biographer Claire Tomalin on Charles Dickens

Jasper Rees

The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so...

Read more...

'Books have been my life': Doris Lessing

Jasper Rees

Doris Lessing’s storm-tossed life would make a stirring biopic. She spent her early years on an isolated farm in the Southern Rhodesian veldt, abandoned the children of her first marriage to take...

Read more...

10 Questions for Count Arthur Strong

Jasper Rees

Autumn is a season of tumbling leaves, dark afternoons and of course fatuous memoirs from people off the telly. But every so often the world is taken by surprise, less by autumn itself than by the...

Read more...

Extract: George Harrison - Behind the Locked Door

graeme Thomson

Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Sex researcher Shere Hite

Jasper Rees

This week Channel 4 embarks on a season of programmes about sex. Real sex, it claims, in real British bedrooms. A new series called Masters of Sex dramatises the story of William Masters...

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... ...
Slow Horses, Series 5, Apple TV+ review - terror, trauma and...

Fifth time around, Slow Horses continues to show the rest of the field a clean pair of heels. Or hooves. The adventures of Jackson Lamb (...

Album: Night Tapes - portals//polarities

“Helix” is the ninth track on portals//polarities. With this dramatic, acid house-leaning slab of shoegazing-infused...

Kerry Godliman, G-Live review - she's livid but deliver...

Kerry Godliman is livid, she tells us. Spider webs catching in her hair, the state of the world, her teenage children; you name it,...

Mark Hussey: Mrs Dalloway - Biography of a Novel review - ec...

Writing in her diary just over 100 years ago on 19th June 1923, Virginia Woolf wrote: “In this...

Jansen, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - profound and bracing...

Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very...

Jakub Hrůša and Friends in Concert, Royal Opera review - fle...

Between bouts of that far from shabby, still shocking masterpiece Tosca, Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša ...

The Weir, Harold Pinter Theatre review - evasive fantasy, bl...

Why are the Irish such good storytellers? The historical perspective is that the oral tradition goes way, way back, allied to the gift of the gab...

Hadelich, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Man...

Concerts need to have themes, it seems, today, and the BBC Philharmonic’s publicity suggested two contrasting ideas for the opening of its 2025-26...

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