mon 23/12/2024

book reviews and features

David Lodge: Writer’s Luck - A Memoir 1976-1991 review - literary days, in detail

Marina Vaizey

Metaphor, metonymy, simile and synecdoche, anyone? FR Leavis, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode? If any of this, and more, turns you on, this lengthy...

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Nick Coleman: Voices - How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life, review - earworms explored

Liz Thomson

Readers familiar with Nick Coleman’s 2012 memoir The Train in the Night will know before embarking on this book that the author suffered the worst possible fate for a music journalist:...

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Best of 2017: Books

Boyd Tonkin

With a clownish bully currently installed in the White House, the 2017 Man Booker Prize aptly went to a...

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Nicholas Blincoe: Bethlehem - Biography of a Town review - too few wise men but remarkable women

Boyd Tonkin

Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal ...

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Jenny Uglow: Mr Lear - A Life of Art and Nonsense review - a lonely Victorian life, so richly illustrated

Marina Vaizey

Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (1812-1888) is a meander, almost day by day, through the long and...

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Naum Kleiman: Eisenstein on Paper review - a lavish journey into the unconscious

David Nice

"From drawing, via the theatre, to the cinema". Naum Kleiman's  introductory qualification of Sergey Eisenstein's own self-perceived line in his Film Form is one that he follows in a...

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Jaron Lanier: Dawn of the New Everything review - pioneer of virtual reality tells his story

Sebastian Scotney

Jaron Lanier has quite a story to tell. From a teenage flute-playing goat-herd in New Mexico...

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Rachel Hewitt: A Revolution of Feeling review - from passions to emotions

Katherine Waters

Utopias have a way of going up in flames. Rachel Hewitt’s new book, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind, charts the revolutionary fervour and disappointment...

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Reza Aslan: God - A Human History review - on being 'sapiens', and believing

Marina Vaizey

It is not just the season of holidays and holy days in the monotheistic ...

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Javier Marías: Between Eternities review - matters of life and death from the Spanish master

Boyd Tonkin

One of these years, Javier Marías will probably win the Nobel Prize in Literature. If and when that...

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