sat 08/02/2025

Ismene Brown

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Bio
Dr Ismene Brown designed and launched the original version of The Arts Desk in 2009, and was the Site Coordinator and a board director for three years, as well as its dance editor. A musician trained at the Royal College of Music, she has been dance critic for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator, and has also written for TAD on classical music, theatre, TV and film. Since then she has gained an MA at UCL and DPhil at Oxford University for work on the Soviet politician and arts minister Ekaterina Furtseva.

Articles By Ismene Brown

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

It followed some...

Album: Squid - Cowards

Brighton band Squid are not in the business of...

Elektra, Duke of York's Theatre review - Brie Larson...

We live in tragic times given over to cataclysmic events that require outsized emotions in return. That may be one reason to account for the...

Widmann, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - razor-sharp attack...

Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly...

Bring Them Down review - ramming it home in the west of Irel...

“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful...

Album: Rats on Rafts - Deep Below

Deep Below’s first track is titled “Hibernation.” “A winter breeze blows through my mind,” intones a colourless, dispirited male voice....

First Person: writer Lauren Mooney on bringing bodies togeth...

It started with a Guardian long-read. I’m ashamed to admit it since so many shows could say the same, but that was the beginning.

It was the...

The Marriage of Figaro, English National Opera review - long...

Who’s in and who’s not – on the secret, the joke, the relationship, the family, the club? That’s the fulcrum of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ ingeniously...

September 5 review - gripping real-life thriller

There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants –...