tue 11/03/2025

book reviews and features

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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Tina Brown: The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992 review - portrait of an era of glitz and excess

Markie Robson-Scott

Tina Brown’s first Christmas issue of Vanity Fair in 1984 had this to say about “the sulky,...

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The Best of AA Gill review - posthumous words collected

Katherine Waters

Word wizard. Grammar bully. Sentence shark. AA Gill didn’t play fair by syntax: he pounced on it, surprising it into splendid shapes. And who cared when he wooed readers with anarchy and aplomb?...

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Jonathan Coe: The Broken Mirror review - potent, crystalline, but rather small

Matthew Wright

Novelist Jonathan Coe has, for some time, been assuming the role of an Evelyn Waugh of the...

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