sat 15/02/2025

book reviews and features

Jonathan Kennedy: Pathogenesis - How Germs Made History review - a return to the infections that formed us

Jon Turney

The Cayapo tribe, a shade under 10,000 strong, lived in South America unacquainted with humans in the wider world until 1903. That year, they accepted a missionary who, along with news of...

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Loving Highsmith review - documentary focused on the writer's lighter side

Helen Hawkins

Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this...

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Diana Evans: A House for Alice review - lyrical sequel to Ordinary People

Markie Robson-Scott

Diana Evans specialises in houses, their baleful quirks and the meaning of home. In her acclaimed third novel, Ordinary People (2018), formerly happy, black couple Melissa and Michael...

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Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinking

Alice Brewer

In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the...

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Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save us

Hannah Hutching

“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat.

Lecturing a teenage coven on the art...

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Margaret Atwood: Old Babes in the Wood review - bookending the short story

India Lewis

Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book...

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Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history

Hugh Barnes

For almost half a century, from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021, Janet Malcolm was a staff writer on the New Yorker where her meticulous reporting and provocatively strong opinions...

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Nicole Flattery: Nothing Special review - returning to the Factory

India Lewis

It seems that Andy Warhol’s Factory – silver-dusted and populated with tragic, drug-addicted minor...

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Will Harris: Brother Poem review - writing the poems that could have been

Jack Barron

You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-...

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Disbelief - 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (ed. Julia Nemirovskaya) review - writing battle-lines

Hugh Barnes

On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world...

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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

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I always advocate in favour of more sci-fi plays, and over the past decade there have been a gratifying number of them. But one essential element...

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It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to...

MacMillan's Ordo Virtutum, BBC Singers, Jeannin, Milton...

Does any living composer write better for choirs, or more demandingly when circumstances allow, than James MacMillan? Admirable as it is to have...

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Ridley Scott’s 2001 film Black Hawk Down was a technically superb blockbuster bristling with thunderous action sequences and famous...

Memoir of a Snail review - deliciously offbeat Australian an...

Having recently watched the charming animation Marcelle The Shell With Shoes On with my nine-year-old son, I was going to suggest for our...

To a Land Unknown review - the migrant hustle

The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s...

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