book reviews and features
Amy Sackville: Painter to the King review - portrait of the artist in shadow and light
Sunday, 15 April 2018
Inevitably, the story begins and (almost) ends with Las Meninas. Inspired by the art and life of Diego Velázquez, Amy Sackville tops and tails her third novel with his endlessly enigmatic... Read more... |
Richard Vinen: The Long ’68 review - more impartial than impassioned
Sunday, 08 April 2018
Born into the late 1950s, I was too young to be a 68er, though I remember watching it all on TV: the protests in Red... Read more... |
Irvine Welsh: Dead Men's Trousers review - Renton and Begbie make it safely to middle age
Sunday, 01 April 2018
When it came out in 1993, Trainspotting was probably the most shocking novel since Lady Chatterley's Lover. It’s rumoured to have missed out on a Booker shortlisting... Read more... |
Listed: The 10 Best Biblical Novels
Sunday, 25 March 2018
From the myths of the Old Testament to the miracles of the New, the Bible has been as much a source of... Read more... |
Lynne Murphy: The Prodigal Tongue review - two nations divided by a common language?
Sunday, 25 March 2018
For as long as I can remember, and long before I set foot in America for the first time at age 24, I have... Read more... |
Richard Sennett: Building and Dwelling - Ethics for the City review
Sunday, 18 March 2018
All the great sociologists, in the tradition of Georg Simmel, Max Weber and others, are on a mission. They cannot help wishing to change the world. Science should be value-free, but the social... Read more... |
Agnès Poirier: Left Bank review - Paris in war and peace
Sunday, 11 March 2018
There are too many awestruck cultural histories of... Read more... |
Matthew Sweet: Operation Chaos review - paranoia and insanity in the Cold War
Sunday, 11 March 2018
In 2017 the documentary series The Vietnam War told the story, from soup to nuts, of America’s misadventure in south-east Asia. It now seems the comprehensive... Read more... |
'In order to write my book I had to kill Jane Austen'
Sunday, 11 March 2018
My heroine would not have appeared in a Jane Austen novel. Brilliant, arch and incisive though Austen... Read more... |
Stephen Walsh's Debussy - A Painter in Sound - extract
Monday, 05 March 2018
All this time La Mer had been brewing. It was almost a year since Debussy had written to Colonne... Read more... |
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