book reviews and features
Will Harris: Brother Poem review - writing the poems that could have been
Saturday, 04 March 2023
You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-... Read more... |
Disbelief - 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (ed. Julia Nemirovskaya) review - writing battle-lines
Thursday, 23 February 2023
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world... Read more... |
Sally Adee: We Are Electric review - currents that run through us all
Friday, 17 February 2023
All the things going on with me as I type this – fingers moving keys, eye and brain registering characters on my screen, thoughts that will (I hope) generate the next lot of characters – rely on... Read more... |
Extract: The Northern Silence - Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture by Andrew Mellor
Wednesday, 15 February 2023
“Silence,” Andrew Mellor contends, “is more prominent in the northernmost reaches of Europe.” Yet it is more like a texture or an apprehension of vacancy than a state of true soundlessness:... Read more... |
'I let it emerge': an interview with Fiona Benson on the cusp of the TS Eliot Prize announcement
Friday, 20 January 2023
Fiona Benson’s new collection of poems, Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape, 2022), tries to capture those things that are always moving out of grasp. It does this through four sections: the first... Read more... |
Jaan Kross: A Book of Falsehoods review - plague, power and deception in 16th century Tallinn
Thursday, 05 January 2023
When the first volume of Estonian master Jaan Kross’s peerless historical trilogy first appeared in an English... Read more... |
Best of 2022: Books
Saturday, 31 December 2022
From Kafka’s spry sketches to Derek Owusu’s novel-poem, and Jaan Kross’s Estonian Wolf Hall to Katherine Rundell’s spirited biography of John Donne, our reviewers take the time to share... Read more... |
10 Questions for writer and translator Saskia Vogel
Wednesday, 21 December 2022
Johanne Lykke Holm’s spellbinding novel Strega recounts one teen’s journey into womanhood.... Read more... |
Bob Dylan: The Philosophy of Modern Song review - a book that contains multitudes
Tuesday, 20 December 2022
Some years after Chronicles (2004) a book that broke moulds and delighted with its originality, and as with albums... Read more... |
Kelefa Sanneh: Major Labels review - diary of an omnivorous musicophile
Wednesday, 14 December 2022
Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres is American critic Kelefa Sanneh’s ambitious survey of musical history. As such, it risks remaining only a... 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
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly,...
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...