book reviews and features
Sophia Giovannitti: Working Girl - On Selling Art and Selling Sex review - portrait of the artist as sex worker
Wednesday, 31 May 2023
Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.” I nearly –... Read more... |
Kieran Yates: All the Houses I've Ever Lived In, Brighton Festival 2023 review - home as comfort, and cruelty
Sunday, 28 May 2023
The audience questions are when Kieran Yates’ talk boils over. Her book All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In considers housing policy through autobiography and imaginative research, and the preceding... Read more... |
Matthew Shindell: For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet review - a world of possibility
Friday, 19 May 2023
Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds. So it has... Read more... |
Susan Finlay: The Lives of the Artists review - the knotted threads of memoir and art
Wednesday, 17 May 2023
Benvenuto Cellini’s My Life (1728) is not the artist-biography to which Susan Finlay’s The Lives of the Artists pays its most obvious homage, but it appears to have followed its... Read more... |
Glory to Sound: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Brighton Festival 2023 review - a reggae rebel's life in music
Monday, 15 May 2023
Straight-backed at 70, Linton Kwesi Johnson wears the smart garb of a British Caribbean elder – trilby, cream jacket, West Indies maroon jumper and tie, grey trousers, blue socks and grey shoes.... Read more... |
Keggie Carew: Beastly review - the history of animals and us
Monday, 15 May 2023
There’s been an avalanche of books about animals and trees. The more species disappear and forests are felled, the more titles are published: laments, celebrations, extinction alarms and rhapsodic... Read more... |
Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapes
Tuesday, 09 May 2023
On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored... Read more... |
A. Anatoli: Babi Yar - The Story of Ukraine's Holocaust review - a masterpiece uncensored
Friday, 05 May 2023
The great Russian novelists of the 19th century wrote what Henry James called "large, loose, baggy monsters" out of belief that "truth" was... Read more... |
Max Porter: Shy review - an ode to boyhood and rage
Wednesday, 03 May 2023
Max Porter continues his fascination with the struggles of youth in his newest release, Shy: his most beautifully-wrought... Read more... |
Solmaz Sharif: Customs review - a poetics of exile and return
Monday, 01 May 2023
The language of poetic technique is perhaps weighted towards rupture, rather than reparation: lines end and break, we count beats and stress, experience caesurae (literally ‘cuttings’), and mark... Read more... |
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The House of Bernarda Alba, Lyttleton Theatre review - dazzl...
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Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime, Charles Court Opera, Jermyn Str...
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Grosvenor, Park, Ridout, Soltani, Wigmore Hall review - cham...
Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Quartet was astutely described by his student Benjamin Britten as “Brahms tempered with Fauré”, so it made...
Album: Peter Gabriel - I/O
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up...
A Christmas Carol, The Old Vic review - older, wiser, and ye...
Familiarity has bred something quite fantastic with the Old Vic Christmas Carol, which is back for a seventh season and merits ringing...
Boat Story, BBC One review - once upon a time in Yorkshire
It was as long ago as January last year that the prolific Williams brothers,...
Dariescu, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Man...
John Storgårds found himself literally facing both ways for the third item on the BBC Philharmonic’s programme on Saturday: towards the audience,...
Mark Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris review - a show...
The vast and various spaces of Frank Gehry’s monumental Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris suit the needs of the thrilling Mark Rothko exhibition...
Blu-ray: King and Country
British anti-war films inspired by “the war that” failed “to end all wars” include Oh! What a Lovely War, The Return of the Soldier...