book reviews and features
Sunday Book: Jake Arnott - The Fatal Tree
Sunday, 19 February 2017
Novelist Jake Arnott has an eye for seedy glamour. The Fatal Tree takes the 1720s underworld - the setting of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, one of the most successful... Read more... |
'My father Sabahattin Ali is being rediscovered'
Sunday, 19 February 2017
I was 11 years old when my father was killed. A body was found near the border between Turkey and Bulgaria.... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Philip Hook - Rogues' Gallery
Sunday, 12 February 2017
The art dealers of today must be thanking their lucky stars that Philip Hook’s remarkable history of their trade stops where it does. For while it serves as an eminently useful if rather... Read more... |
The private life of Stefan Zweig in England
Thursday, 09 February 2017
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Neil Gaiman - Norse Mythology
Sunday, 05 February 2017
Odin the All-Father, “lord of the slain, the gallows god”, has two ravens that “perch on his shoulders and whisper into his ears” as he wanders in disguise around the world. They are Huginn and... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Daniel Levitin - A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics
Sunday, 29 January 2017
Daniel Levitin makes one reference to Donald Trump in this book (to the latter’s claim to have seen on TV... Read more... |
Dr Michael Scott: How to make the most of globalisation
Sunday, 29 January 2017
The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Tessa Hadley - Bad Dreams
Sunday, 22 January 2017
In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “... Read more... |
Sunday Book: James Lee Burke - The Jealous Kind
Sunday, 15 January 2017
In the heat of a Texas summer, Aaron Holland Broussard comes of age. It’s 1952: the two world wars still cast their long shadows and, far away, the Americans are fighting the Russians in a... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Michel Houellebecq - Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013
Sunday, 08 January 2017
The American poet-critic Randall Jarrell once entitled a collection of essays A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. He might have enjoyed Michel Houellebecq’s poem “Hypermarket - November”. Its... Read more... |
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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...
Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high
Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’...
Music Reissues Weekly: The Hamburg Repertoire
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Album: Dr Robert & Matt Deighton - The Instant Garden
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The Accountant 2 review - belated return of Ben Affleck...
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The Inseparables, Finborough Theatre review - uneven portrai...
The Finborough has once again performed the miracle of creating a whole world in its intimate space: this time, inter-war France, where...