sun 03/08/2025

book reviews and features

Anne Applebaum: Twilight of Democracy review - lost friends and new hope

David Nice

Things fell apart; the Centre Right could not hold. Anne Applebaum knows it from the inside. A Reaganite with whom I imagine a civilized conversation would have been possible even in former times...

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Vincent van Gogh: the reader and the writer

Marina Vaizey

A life in art, a life in looking; a life in writing, a life in reading; a life fuelled by passionate emotions, personal attachments and religious turmoil. There are a few artists whose lives are...

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Jenny Diski: Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Essays review - a posthumous collection from the pages of the LRB

Liz Thomson

“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.” That was Diski’s response to daughter’s Choe’s observation that if she were buried – a friend had just offered her a spot in a plot she’d...

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theartsdesk Q&A: author Jorge Consiglio

Olivia Fletcher

Fate: commonly understood to mean the opposite of chance or, more narrowly speaking, a theological concept. Often synonymous with predetermination – an idea which might be used to justify a set of...

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Luis Sagasti: A Musical Offering review – the sounds of silence

Boyd Tonkin

Luis Sagasti attends closely to the silence that precedes, pauses, and follows music in this mesmeric collage of stories inspired by the sounds that humans – and animals, and stars – create. Like...

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Bette Howland: Blue in Chicago review – the city on trial, with the writer as witness

Daniel Lewis

You feel at times, while reading the collection Blue in Chicago, that Bette Howland might have missed her vocation...

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Terri White: Coming Undone review - a British journalist unravels in NYC

Markie Robson-Scott

The journalistic addiction-memoir is a crowded genre these days: Details editor Dan Perez chronicles his massive intake of Vicodin and other opioids in As Needed for Pain; ...

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Camille Laurens: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen review - the story of a sculpture

Charlie Stone

Edgar Degas is famous for his depictions of ballet dancers. His drawings, paintings and sculptures of young...

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Tahar Ben Jelloun: The Punishment review - triumph over torture

Katherine Waters

In July 1966, Tahar Ben Jelloun’s life changed. As punishment for participating in a peaceful student demonstration against the authoritarian King Hassan II of...

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A. Kendra Greene: The Museum of Whales You Will Never See review - a thoughtful museum piece

India Lewis

The Museum of Whales is an unfolding: a slow process of describing a country, its people, and its past through its esoteric and bizarre museums. The book is structured into galleries...

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