book reviews and features

Søren Dahlgaard’s Dough Portraits

theartsdesk Sunday, 03 January 2016

Can a portrait really be a portrait if we can’t see a person’s face? And what if the reason we can’t see their face is that it is covered with a lump of dough? Is it a joke? And if it is a joke,...

Extract: The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre

Aleks Sierz And Thursday, 23 July 2015

Theatre is one of the glories of British culture, a melting pot of creativity and innovation. Beginning with the coronation of Elizabeth I and ending with the televised crowning of the current...

theartsdesk Q&A: Günter Grass

Kate Connolly Tuesday, 14 April 2015

The Nobel prize-winning writer, playwright and artist Günter Grass was arguably the best-known German-language author of the second half of the 20th century. Kate Connolly met him in May 2010 in...

theartsdesk at the Port Eliot Festival

Mark Hudson Monday, 28 July 2014

Remember when festivals were only about what they were ostensibly about? When, say, Reading offered nothing beyond hard rock bar disgusting toilets, overpriced hamburgers and the prospect of a...

Extracts: John Tusa - Pain in the Arts

Ismene Brown Monday, 16 June 2014

In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a...

theartsdesk Q&A: Biographer Claire Tomalin on Charles Dickens

Jasper Rees Monday, 03 February 2014

The tally of Charles Dickens’s biographers grows ever closer to 100. The English language’s most celebrated novelist repays repeated study, of course, because both his life and his work are so...

'Books have been my life': Doris Lessing

Jasper Rees Sunday, 17 November 2013

Doris Lessing’s storm-tossed life would make a stirring biopic. She spent her early years on an isolated farm in the Southern Rhodesian veldt, abandoned the children of her first marriage to take...

10 Questions for Count Arthur Strong

Jasper Rees Monday, 11 November 2013

Autumn is a season of tumbling leaves, dark afternoons and of course fatuous memoirs from people off the telly. But every so often the world is taken by surprise, less by autumn itself than by the...

Extract: George Harrison - Behind the Locked Door

graeme Thomson Saturday, 12 October 2013

Following the completion of the White Album, and the conclusion of recording sessions in Los Angeles with new Apple signing Jackie Lomax, in late November 1968 George Harrison and his...

theartsdesk Q&A: Sex researcher Shere Hite

Jasper Rees Saturday, 05 October 2013

This week Channel 4 embarks on a season of programmes about sex. Real sex, it claims, in real British bedrooms. A new series called Masters of Sex dramatises the story of William Masters...

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