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's a Sin, Channel 4 review - poignant, funny, vibrant...
Finally, it seems, the time is right for a major British TV drama about how the AIDS crisis hit the early 1980s London...
Reissue CDs Weekly: Richard Hell & The Voidoids - Destin...
"Three plus versions of the same album. It’s ridiculous, but I’m glad.” The first paragraph of Richard Hell’s text in the booklet accompanying...
Persian Lessons review - confusing Holocaust drama
This is an odd film, made even odder by a caption near the beginning, which claims it is "inspired by true events" but doesn’t elaborate. Produced...
Album: Bicep - Isles
Bicep's second album fufills the promise of the first, released in 2017 to wide acclaim. Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, friends since...
Quo Vadis, Aida review - a Bosnian woman confronts genocide
Jasmila Žbanić’s latest film, once again about the people...
Back, Channel 4 review - return of sibling-rivalry comedy wi...
It has taken three years for the second series of Back to reach our screens (a combination of the creator being busy, a star being unwell...
Call My Agent!, Series 4, Netflix review - the final bow for...
Sad to report, this fourth series of Call My Agent! (...
Album: Wardruna - Kvitravn
Norway’s Wardruna have proved to be an unlikely international musical success, both within Scandinavia and further afield, since releasing their...
'The total confusion about post-Brexit rules adds to th...
“Fuck business,” Boris Johnson is alleged to have said while Foreign Secretary. (He didn’t deny it). We have seen enough over the past three weeks...