book reviews and features
Hermione Lee: Tom Stoppard, A Life review - the last word on a theatrical wordsmith![]()
"The older he got, the less he cared about self-concealment," or so it is said of Sir Tom Stoppard,... Read more... |
William Boyd: Trio review - private perils in 1968![]()
William Boyd’s fiction is populated by all manner of artists. Writers, painters, photographers, musicians and... Read more... |
John Lanchester: Reality, and Other Stories review - campfire spooks for the digital age![]()
What do you do when your phone rings, but you know the person ringing isn’t alive? In many ways, the cleverly named Reality, and Other Stories is a collection of... Read more... |
Bob Woodward: Rage review - terror and tyranny in the White House![]()
“Build the wall!” exhorted Trump, at rally after rally back in the days when we’d all acknowledged his moral repugnancy but still believed he could never attain the presidency. And Trump has... Read more... |
Ottessa Moshfegh: Death in Her Hands review - a case of murder mind![]()
Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises... Read more... |
Sudhir Hazareesingh: Black Spartacus review – the life, and thought, of the first black super-hero![]()
The former slave, and coachman on a sugar plantation, began one of his early public proclamations in a typically defiant vein: “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name.” At that... Read more... |
Ian Williams: Reproduction review - a dazzling kaleidoscope of life's tragicomedy![]()
Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has... Read more... |
Emma Cline: Daddy review - scintillating short stories by the author of The Girls![]()
The Girls, Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel of 2016, was billed as a story based on the Manson murders. But in fact, like some of the stories in Daddy, her new short-story... Read more... |
Naomi Klein: On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal review - an unapologetic manifesto![]()
On Fire brings together a decade’s worth of dispatches from the frontline of the... Read more... |
James Rebanks: English Pastoral, An Inheritance review - a manifesto for a radical agricultural rethink![]()
Coming from a family of farmers, with periods of time spent working on a farm in the past ten years, I found James Rebanks’ English Pastoral: An Inheritance to be a highly... Read more... |
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