Books
Jacqueline Rose: The Plague review - tracing our response to tragedySaturday, 17 June 2023
In The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, Jacqueline Rose makes a surprising pivot from her usual topics – Sylvia Plath, children’s fiction, Zionism, to name a few – to throw a spotlight on the Covid-19 pandemic. It was hard to process the... Read more... |
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Small Worlds review - Ghana and London dance togetherWednesday, 14 June 2023
Small Worlds, the second novel from Caleb Azumah Nelson, is a delight: a book with a real feeling for sound and dance, and a sense of place from London to Ghana and back again. It’s a story of a first romance, the intricacies of family life, the... Read more... |
Andrey Kurkov: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv review - a city speaks its multitudesSaturday, 10 June 2023
Rock music helped to subvert the Soviet Union by glamorising youthful rebellion and the West. In the opening scene of Andrey Kurkov’s novel Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, a bunch of ageing hippies gather at night on the anniversary of the American... Read more... |
Helen Czerski: Blue Machine review - how the ocean worksTuesday, 06 June 2023
If you cannot even step into the same river twice, how to take the measure of the ocean? Dipping your toes at the beach is irresistible, but uninformative. Sampling stuff out at sea helps more, but you have to get serious. Consider the Continuous... Read more... |
Polly Toynbee: An Uneasy Inheritance - My Family and Other Radicals review - looking backMonday, 05 June 2023
There are few contemporary journalists whose names are instantly familiar – and usually it’s for the wrong reasons. Polly Toynbee occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of all those on the left. To those on the right, she is among the most... Read more... |
Sophia Giovannitti: Working Girl - On Selling Art and Selling Sex review - portrait of the artist as sex workerWednesday, 31 May 2023
Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.”I nearly – mentally – tweak that sentence to read “of conventional types... Read more... |
Kieran Yates: All the Houses I've Ever Lived In, Brighton Festival 2023 review - home as comfort, and crueltySunday, 28 May 2023
The audience questions are when Kieran Yates’ talk boils over. Her book All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In considers housing policy through autobiography and imaginative research, and the preceding interview has focused on its sometimes academic... Read more... |
Matthew Shindell: For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet review - a world of possibilityFriday, 19 May 2023
Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds.So it has been with Mars, conspicuous to us Earthbound gazers as one... Read more... |
Susan Finlay: The Lives of the Artists review - the knotted threads of memoir and artWednesday, 17 May 2023
Benvenuto Cellini’s My Life (1728) is not the artist-biography to which Susan Finlay’s The Lives of the Artists pays its most obvious homage, but it appears to have followed its advice. All men of achievement and honesty, Cellini argues, "should... Read more... |
Glory to Sound: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Brighton Festival 2023 review - a reggae rebel's life in musicMonday, 15 May 2023
Straight-backed at 70, Linton Kwesi Johnson wears the smart garb of a British Caribbean elder – trilby, cream jacket, West Indies maroon jumper and tie, grey trousers, blue socks and grey shoes. His voice has resonant, slow-rolling authority... Read more... |
Keggie Carew: Beastly review - the history of animals and usMonday, 15 May 2023
There’s been an avalanche of books about animals and trees. The more species disappear and forests are felled, the more titles are published: laments, celebrations, extinction alarms and rhapsodic accounts of animal sentience. Beastly is all of... Read more... |
Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapesTuesday, 09 May 2023
On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.Masud is, amongst other... Read more... |
