Books
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages of love and supportFriday, 14 November 2025
We are bowled over! We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something... Read more... |
Frances Wilson: Electric Spark - The Enigma of Muriel Spark review - the matter of factTuesday, 16 September 2025
How do you tell the story of a person’s mind? In the preface to Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, published this year by Bloomsbury, Frances Wilson points out that biography was one of her subject’s own fixations.Spark’s first full-length... Read more... |
Elizabeth Alker: Everything We Do is Music review - Prokofiev goes popWednesday, 27 August 2025
Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.In the 20th century that changed radically. New technologies... Read more... |
Natalia Ginzburg: The City and the House review - a dying artSaturday, 02 August 2025
Many readers and writers think of epistolary novels as old-fashioned, just as letter writing itself can seem a bit quaint nowadays. The genre became popular during the 18th and 19th centuries following the success of Samuel Richardson’s ... Read more... |
Tom Raworth: Cancer review - truthfulnessFriday, 04 July 2025
I recently heard a BBC Radio 4 presenter use the troubling phrase: "Not everyone agreed on the reality of that." Once the domain of Andre Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme, such sentiments are now alarmingly commonplace: part and parcel of the BBC’s... Read more... |
Ian Leslie: John and Paul - A Love Story in Songs review - help!Wednesday, 25 June 2025
Do we need any more Beatles books? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. What we need is more Beatles books that are worth reading. As the musician and music historian Bob Stanley pointed out, in his 2007 review of Jonathan Gould’s Can’t Buy Me... Read more... |
Samuel Arbesman: The Magic of Code review - the spark agesWednesday, 11 June 2025
The slightly overwrought subtitle, "How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World and Shapes Our Future", gives a good indication how computer enthusiast Sam Arbesman treats his subject. Software, written in a variety of programming... Read more... |
Zsuzsanna Gahse: Mountainish review - seeking refugeTuesday, 29 April 2025
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters. Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire in Prototype’s English-language edition, a narrator travels in the... Read more... |
Patrick McGilligan: Woody Allen - A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham review - New York storiesWednesday, 09 April 2025
Patrick McGilligan’s biography of Woody Allen weighs in at an eye-popping 800 pages, yet he waits only for the fourth paragraph of his introduction before mentioning the toxic elephant in the room: i.e. the sad fact that, despite never having been... Read more... |
Howard Amos: Russia Starts Here review - East meets West, via the Pskov regionTuesday, 01 April 2025
Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire, the journalist Howard Amos’ first book, is a prescient and fascinating examination of the borderlands of a bellicose nation. Focusing on the Pskov region, which juts out into eastern Europe, his... Read more... |
Henry Gee: The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Why Our Species is on the Edge of Extinction review - survival instinctsSaturday, 15 March 2025
Henry Gee’s previous book, A Brief History of Life on Earth, made an interestingly downbeat read for a title that won the UK’s science book prize. He emphasised that a constant feature of that history is extinction. Disappearing is simply what... Read more... |
Jonathan Buckley: One Boat review - a shore thingTuesday, 11 March 2025
One Boat, Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel, captures a series of encounters at the water’s edge: characters converge like trailing filaments on the shoreline, lightly touching, their eventual separation assumed. Through this, Buckley pays profound... Read more... |
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