fri 29/08/2025

book reviews and features

Judith Herrin: Ravenna review - flashes of order and beauty in a chaotic world

David Nice

Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the...

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Jenny Hval: Girls Against God review - a sticky dance through space and time

India Lewis

Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy...

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10 Questions for Poet and Critic Rebecca Tamás

Jessica Payn

Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "...

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The Secret History of My Library: Essay by Daniel Saldaña París

Daniel Saldaña Paris

Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible...

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Dolly Alderton: Ghosts review - a love story beyond romance

India Lewis

There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely...

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Richard J Evans: The Hitler Conspiracies review – Nazi myths debunked

Boyd Tonkin

In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Sally Anne Gross and Dr George Musgrave, authors of 'Can Music Make You Sick?'

joe Muggs

Today is World Mental Health Day and of course that means an awful lot of hugs and homilies, thoughts and prayers, deep-breathing exercises and it’s-good-to-talk platitudes from people speaking...

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Book extract: Snake by Erica Wright

theartsdesk

Ophidiophobia is one of our most common fears, from the Greek for serpent ('Ophidia'). Writer and editor Erica Wright grew up in Tennessee with periodic interruptions from rattlesnakes,...

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Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmith

Matt Wolf

"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard,...

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William Boyd: Trio review - private perils in 1968

Charlie Stone

William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and...

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One door closes, and another one opens. A lot. It’s extraordinary what value those two simple additions to the Royal Albert Hall stage lent to...

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King & Conqueror, BBC One review - not many kicks in 106...

In this strangely dreary recreation of 11th century history, it’s not just grim oop north, it’s grim everywhere. King & Conqueror...

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Playwright Mike Bartlett is, like many writers, a chronicler of both contemporary manners and of the state of the nation. In his latest domestic...

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