tue 20/05/2025

book reviews and features

Charlie Porter: Bring No Clothes - Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion review - dress to impress

India Lewis

It’s not hard to miss the fact that Bloomsbury is back in fashion at the moment. This summer, it felt like everyone’s Instagram story showed a...

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Adam Sisman: The Secret Life of John le Carré review - tinker, tailor, soldier, cheat

Bernard Hughes

This book is quite a sad read. I had been looking forward to it, as a posthumous supplement to Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography of John le Carré/David Cornwell, which, at the time, quite clearly drew...

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Caspar Henderson: A Book of Noises - Notes on the Auraculous review - a call to ears

Jon Turney

Have you ever considered the sheer range of sounds? You may think of deliberate human efforts to move the air: music and song, poetry or...

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'The people behind the postcards': an interview with Priya Hein, author of 'Riambel'

Hannah Hutching

Priya Hein’s debut novel, Riambel, is an excoriating examination of Mauritius’ socio-political structures and the colonial past from which they have sprung. Centred around Noemi, a young...

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Michael Peppiatt: Giacometti in Paris review - approaching the impossible

Jack Barron

We begin with a dead-end. In 1966, Michael Peppiatt – at the time “an obscure young man” – travelled to Paris to...

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Annie Ernaux: Shame review - the translation of pain

India Lewis

The latest translation of Annie Ernaux’s Shame – a text most closely akin to a long-form essay – is an...

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Warhol, Velázquez, and leaving things out: an interview with Lynne Tillman

Alice Brewer

Motion Sickness (1991) is the second novel published by the writer, art collector and cultural critic Lynne Tillman. It is difficult,...

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Celia Dale: Sheep's Clothing review - unsettling, mundane, and right on-trend

CP Hunter

Celia Dale published 13 novels between 1944 and her death in 2011. A majority of her these are often categorised – albeit loosely – as...

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Lutz Seiler: Pitch & Glint review - real verse power

Jack Barron

Reading the torrent of press-releases and blurbs on the many – and ever-growing – contemporary poetry collections over time, one starts to notice a distinct recurrence of certain buzzwords: ...

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Zadie Smith: The Fraud review - the trials we inherit

India Lewis

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, is her first venture into historical fiction – a fiction based...

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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

The Fifth Step, Soho Place review - wickedly funny two-hande...

The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter....

Josefowicz, LSO, Mälkki, Barbican review - two old favourite...

Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two...

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Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has creative...

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Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on...

Parsifal, Glyndebourne review - the music flies up, the dram...

There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and old actor versions...

The Bombing of Pan Am 103, BBC One review - new dramatisatio...

The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s ...

Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon Works, Royal Ballet review - th...

Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in ...

Album: Robert Forster - Strawberries

“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during Strawberries' “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not, however,...

Music Reissues Weekly: Chapterhouse - White House Demos

Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on...

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