tue 10/06/2025

book reviews and features

Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite

India Lewis

This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour,...

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Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise Bourgeois

theartsdesk

How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to...

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Ben Wilson: Metropolis - A History of Humankind's Greatest Invention review - urban resilience throughout the ages

Daniel Lewis

Like the novel, painting and God, the city has long been pronounced dead – along with a few other things, like civil politics, society and the art of conversation that were said to have thrived...

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Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology review - wild writing to stimulate the senses

Daniel Lewis

Among the French composer Claude Debussy’s greatest and characteristically subtle innovations was to put the titles at the end of his pieces. He did this in his piano collection Preludes...

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Judith Herrin: Ravenna review - flashes of order and beauty in a chaotic world

David Nice

Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the...

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Jenny Hval: Girls Against God review - a sticky dance through space and time

India Lewis

Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy...

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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 "...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Eva Quartet, St Cyprian's review - polyphonic bliss

Eva Quartet are four outstanding Bulgarian voices of polyphonic purity and depth, drawn from the legendary choir Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, who...

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In those seemingly long-ago times of loneliness and lockdown, artists around the world invited us into their kitchens and living rooms as they...

Così fan tutte, Nevill Holt Festival/Opera North review - re...

Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their...

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