book reviews and features
theartsdesk at the Port Eliot Festival
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... Read more... |
Extracts: John Tusa - Pain in the Arts
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... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Biographer Claire Tomalin on Charles Dickens
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... Read more... |
'Books have been my life': Doris Lessing
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... Read more... |
10 Questions for Count Arthur Strong
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... Read more... |
Extract: George Harrison - Behind the Locked Door
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... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Sex researcher Shere Hite
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... 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.
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When the world’s darkness is too much, there is a Netflix rabbit-hole you can disappear down to a kinder place: the...
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It took until the last song before Lauren Mayberry started to well up onstage, which was good going. The singer had mentioned early on the...
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The thrill of hearing “Crawdaddy Simone” never wears off. As the September 1965 B-side of the third single by North London R&B band The...