book reviews and features
Ed Vulliamy: When Words Fail review - the band plays onSunday, 23 December 2018
If you're seeking ideas for new playlists and diverse suggestions for reading - and when better to look than at this time of year? - then beware: you may be overwhelmed by the infectious... Read more... |
Boris Akunin: Black City review - a novel to sharpen the witsSunday, 16 December 2018
It is 1914 – a fateful year for assassinations, war and revolution. The fictional Erast Petrovich Fandorin,... Read more... |
Global fiction: the pick of 2018Sunday, 09 December 2018
If you believe the bulk of the “books of the year” features that drift like stray tinsel across the media at this time of year, Britain’s literary taste-makers only enjoy the flavours of the... Read more... |
Matthew Dennison: Eternal Boy review – the banker who stayed forever youngSunday, 25 November 2018
In Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time, a high-powered publisher and politician named Charles Darke quits his posts, regresses to a child-like state, and frolics in the woods like a... Read more... |
Daša Drndić: Belladonna review - a tragicomic journey into Europe's darknessSunday, 18 November 2018
Daša Drndić, the Croatian author who died in June aged 71, has posthumously won the second Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for her coruscating novel Belladonna. The award, set up... Read more... |
Dramatic Exchanges review - a brilliant slice of theatre historySunday, 11 November 2018
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between... Read more... |
Michael Connelly: Dark Sacred Night review - a pairing of loner detectivesSunday, 04 November 2018
The master of the Southern California... Read more... |
Michael Caine: Blowing the Bloody Doors Off review - an actor's handbook, annotated by experienceSunday, 28 October 2018
What a charmer! An irresistible combination of diffidence and confidence, Michael Caine is so much more than Alfie... Read more... |
Julian Baggini: How the World Thinks review - a whirlwind tour of ideasSunday, 21 October 2018
The intrepid philosopher Julian Baggini has travelled the world, going to academic conferences, interviewing scores of practicing philosophers from academics to gurus, trying to figure out and pin... Read more... |
Barbara Kingsolver: Unsheltered review - too many issuesSunday, 14 October 2018
“When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.” Mary Treat, the real-life 19th-century botanist who is one of the characters in... Read more... |
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The Book of Clarence comes lumbered with the charge of being the new Life of Brian, an irreverent spoof of the life...
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...
All three works in the second of this week’s Neville Marriner centenary concerts from the ensemble he founded vindicated their intention to reign...
One can often be made to feel old in the theatre. A hot take in a snappy 90 minutes (with video!) on the latest Gen Z obsession (...
For tonight’s performance at Milton Court, the nuanced and delicate tones of strings, voices, harmonium and chamber organ will merge...
Death Songbook is, says Charles Hazlewood, founder, artistic director and conductor of Paraorchestra, an album of “music which is about...
Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling...
I’ve never been one for school reunions, but even if I had kept in touch with former classmates I think that American...