book reviews and features
Who was St Clair Bayfield?
Thursday, 05 May 2016
This week Stephen Frears's film about Florence Foster Jenkins opens. It will bring to the widest attention yet the story of a New York socialite who couldn’t sing and yet did sing, infamously, to... Read more... |
Søren Dahlgaard’s Dough Portraits
Sunday, 03 January 2016
Can a portrait really be a portrait if we can’t see a person’s face? And what if the reason we can’t see their face is that it is covered with a lump of dough? Is it a joke? And if it is a joke,... Read more... |
Extract: The Time Traveller’s Guide to British Theatre
Thursday, 23 July 2015
Theatre is one of the glories of British culture, a melting pot of creativity and innovation. Beginning with the coronation of Elizabeth I and ending with the televised crowning of the current... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Günter Grass
Tuesday, 14 April 2015
The Nobel prize-winning writer, playwright and artist Günter Grass was arguably the best-known German-language author of the second half of the 20th century. Kate Connolly met him in May 2010 in... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Novelist Hilary Mantel
Monday, 19 January 2015
Hilary Mantel is a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Its... Read more... |
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... |
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Extract: David Lan's As If By Chance
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Elinor Cleghorn: Unwell Women review – misunderstanding and...
I’m one of the women in the pages of Elinor Cleghorn’s new history of the female body, Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a...
Album: Joan Armatrading - Consequences
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In its first issue of 1979, Melody Maker included an...
Blu-ray: The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände)
The German director Robert Wiene is best known for The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), perhaps the most influential piece of...
First Person: Director Maria Aberg on drawing fresh inspirat...
When theatres in the UK closed last March, I found myself in a vacuum. Having been a freelance theatre...
British Ballet Charity Gala, Royal Albert Hall review - a ce...
The Royal Albert Hall – 150 years old this year and with a commemorative £5 coin to prove it – is a great space for many kinds of spectacle...
Lupin, Part 2, Netflix review - master of disguise versus ra...
Lupin isn’t really about the fictional character it’s...