book reviews and features
First Person: Sophie Haydock on going beyond the grave
Thursday, 27 April 2023
It was a cold day in Vienna when Egon Schiele was buried in the Ober-Sankt-Veit cemetery. He was just 28 years old. The controversial... Read more... |
Lydia Sandgren: Collected Works review - the mysteries that surround us all
Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Lydia Sandgren’s debut novel, Collected Works, a bestseller in her native Sweden, has now been translated by Agnes Broomé into English, in all its 733-page glory. An epic family saga, it... Read more... |
Jonathan Kennedy: Pathogenesis - How Germs Made History review - a return to the infections that formed us
Friday, 14 April 2023
The Cayapo tribe, a shade under 10,000 strong, lived in South America unacquainted with humans in the wider world until 1903. That year, they accepted a missionary who, along with news of... Read more... |
Loving Highsmith review - documentary focused on the writer's lighter side
Thursday, 13 April 2023
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this... Read more... |
Diana Evans: A House for Alice review - lyrical sequel to Ordinary People
Tuesday, 04 April 2023
Diana Evans specialises in houses, their baleful quirks and the meaning of home. In her acclaimed third novel, Ordinary People (2018), formerly happy, black couple Melissa and Michael... Read more... |
Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinking
Saturday, 01 April 2023
In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the... Read more... |
Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save us
Tuesday, 28 March 2023
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat. Lecturing a teenage coven on the art... Read more... |
Margaret Atwood: Old Babes in the Wood review - bookending the short story
Tuesday, 14 March 2023
Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book... Read more... |
Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history
Saturday, 11 March 2023
For almost half a century, from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021, Janet Malcolm was a staff writer on the New Yorker where her meticulous reporting and provocatively strong opinions... Read more... |
Nicole Flattery: Nothing Special review - returning to the Factory
Wednesday, 08 March 2023
It seems that Andy Warhol’s Factory – silver-dusted and populated with tragic, drug-addicted minor... Read more... |
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The House of Bernarda Alba, Lyttleton Theatre review - dazzl...
Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at The Almeida; she ends it with...
Album: Trevor Horn - Echoes: Ancient & Modern
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Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime, Charles Court Opera, Jermyn Str...
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and...
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...