fri 04/07/2025

book reviews and features

10 Questions for Poet and Critic Rebecca Tamás

Jessica Payn

Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "...

Read more...

The Secret History of My Library: Essay by Daniel Saldaña París

Daniel Saldaña Paris

Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible...

Read more...

Dolly Alderton: Ghosts review - a love story beyond romance

India Lewis

There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely...

Read more...

Richard J Evans: The Hitler Conspiracies review – Nazi myths debunked

Boyd Tonkin

In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave, authors of 'Can Music Make You Sick?'

joe Muggs

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking...

Read more...

Book extract: Snake by Erica Wright

theartsdesk

Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes,...

Read more...

Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmith

Matt Wolf

"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard,...

Read more...

William Boyd: Trio review - private perils in 1968

Charlie Stone

William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and...

Read more...

John Lanchester: Reality, and Other Stories review - campfire spooks for the digital age

Lydia Bunt

What do you do when your phone rings, but you know the person ringing isn’t alive? In many ways, the cleverly named Reality, and Other Stories is a collection of...

Read more...

Bob Woodward: Rage review - terror and tyranny in the White House

Liz Thomson

“Build the wall!” exhorted Trump, at rally after rally back in the days when we’d all acknowledged his moral repugnancy but still believed he could never attain the presidency. And Trump has...

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... ...
Tom Raworth: Cancer review - truthfulness

I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: ‘Not everyone agreed on the reality of that.’ Once the domain of Andre Breton’s...

Glastonbury Festival 2025: Five Somerset summer days of musi...

MONDAY 30th JUNE 2025

“I think you’d better drive,” says Finetime, his face sallow, skull-sockets underscored by...

Hot Milk review - a mother of a problem

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk, adapted from Deborah Levy’s 2016 Man Booker shortlistee, has been described as a "psychological drama"....

Hill, Sky Documentaries review - how Damon Hill battled his...

Some world champion racing drivers make it look effortless, but it was never that way for Damon Hill. His path to the championship he won in 1996...

Album: Kesha - .

“I’m, like, pop star when I have to pop star, and then I’m...

The Shrouds review - he wouldn't let it lie

“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers...

Album: Claudia Brücken - Night Mirror

German singer Claudia Brücken has had a long and busy career,...

Jurassic World Rebirth review - prehistoric franchise gets a...

The first Jurassic Park movie now seems virtually Jurassic itself, having been released in the sepia-tinged year of 1993. Directed with...

Album: Mocky - Music Will Explain (Choir Music Vol. 1)

Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English...

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