fri 31/03/2023

book reviews and features

Lisa Jewell: 'I’d never killed anyone before'

Lisa Jewell

I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a...

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h.Club 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - it's not all about the mainstream

Liz Thomson

For more than three decades I reported on the publishing industry as a business journalist. The books, the deals, the authors and the publishers, plus the bookshops that sold then. When I started...

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Peter Høeg: The Susan Effect review - Nordic noir turns surreal

Jasper Rees

Peter Høeg is still overwhelmingly known for a novel published a quarter of a century ago. Miss Smilla’s...

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Sarah Hall: Madame Zero review – eerie tales of calamity and change

Boyd Tonkin

Five thousand miles away from her native Lake District, I first understood the eerie magnetism of Sarah Hall’s fiction. As a regional judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, I’d travelled to...

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Enter theartsdesk's Young Reviewer of the Year Award

theartsdesk

The Hospital Club’s annual h.Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art...

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Michael Connelly: The Late Show review - mesmerising and believable characters

Marina Vaizey

Readers have been committed fans since 1992, when the sometime crime reporter...

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Danny Goldberg: In Search of the Lost Chord review - 1967 well remembered

Liz Thomson

I was 10 in 1967 though I remember much about the year, indeed about the era, not least the release of Sgt Pepper and the first live global satellite broadcast, when the...

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Eureka: novelist Anthony Quinn on completing his acclaimed trilogy

Anthony Quinn

I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist,...

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Jonathan Miles: St Petersburg review - culture and calamity

Marina Vaizey

Talk about survival: St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, now again St Petersburg, all the same...

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Chris Patten: First Confession - A Sort of Memoir review - remembrances of government and power

Liz Thomson

It’s 25 years since Chris Patten lost his seat as Conservative MP for Bath. The 1992 election was called by...

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Pages

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Williams, Dunedin Consort, Truscott, Wigmore Hall review - s...

When your special guest is a young soprano with all the world before her, the total artist already, your programme might seem to run itself. Yet...

Law of Tehran review - visceral Iranian police thriller

Here in Europe we mainly see subtle, lyrical Iranian films, targeted at international festivals or art house audiences, so it’s great to get the...

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Complicité, Barb...

Complicité, the adventurous theatre company led today by Simon McBurney, one of its founders, is now 40. Over the last four decades, McBurney and...

God's Creatures review - Irish drama with a touch of Gr...

There’s something about the Irish coastal village that makes filmmakers see...

Album: boygenius - The Record

Maybe you’ve heard the Native American parable about the two...

Theodora, Arcangelo, Cohen, Barbican review - gloriously dar...

Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4...

Riotsville USA review - a training scheme with a tragic lega...

Sierra Pettengill has made the politest angry film I have seen. It has an incendiary quality that comes precisely from its calm stance towards its...

Album: The Zombies - Different Game

There’s something charmingly unassuming and humble about The Zombies. Nowadays their 1968 second album Odyssey and Oracle regularly...

Tom Dale Company, The Place review - immersive and genre-bus...

With all the talk – and, frankly, fear – around AI and the increasing dominance of the digital world, it’s fascinating to see what dance has to...

Mansfield Park, RNCM, Manchester review - bringing out the b...

Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that...

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