wed 28/05/2025

book reviews and features

Olga Tokarczuk: The Empusium review - paranoid prose

Issy Brooks-Ward

In his first of a series of meditations on the sickness that was consuming him, John Donne reflected...

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Stevie Smith: Not Waving But Drowning review - riding the wave

Jack Barron

Last year, Wendy Cope’s poem, "The Orange", went viral on TikTok. I’m not totally certain how a poem goes viral, but it did – and there’s nothing we can do about it.

In fact, Faber &...

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Ellen McWilliams: Resting Places - On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution review - finding art in the inarticulable

Issy Brooks-Ward

How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a...

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Claire Messud: This Strange Eventful History review - home is where the heart was

India Lewis

Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History is personal: a novel, that is, strangely inflected by autobiography, a history that is...

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Paul Alexander: Bitter Crop - The Heartache and Triumph of Billie Holiday's Last Year review - setting the record straight

John Carvill

It’s often said that nobody mythologised Billie Holiday like Billie Holiday. I’m not so sure.

In this fine, clear-eyed...

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Kelly Clancy: Playing with Reality - How Games Shape Our World review - how far games go back

Jon Turney

For a couple of decades, the free video game America’s Army was a powerful recruitment aid for the US military. More than a shoot-em-up, players might find themselves dressing virtual...

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Hugo Rifkind: Rabbits review - 31 wild parties and a funeral

Bernard Hughes

In some ways I’m an appropriate person to review Hugo Rifkind’s new novel Rabbits, a coming-of-age comedy set in the early...

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Extract: Pariah Genius by Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair is a writer, film-maker, and psychogeographer extraordinaire. He began his career in the poetic avant-garde of the Sixties and Seventies, alongisde the likes of Ed Dorn and J. H....

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Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review - a view from the boundaries

Bernard Hughes

In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world – and makes from it a diverting and informative read...

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Lisa Kaltenegger: Alien Earths review - a whole new world

Jon Turney

Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also suns a little while back, cosmically speaking, or a...

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Il Trittico, Opéra de Paris review - reordered Puccini works...

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