thu 07/12/2023

book reviews and features

Omar Robert Hamilton: The City Always Wins review - Egypt's revolution, up close and personal

Boyd Tonkin

A few days ago we learned that British taxpayers have unwittingly donated around £1m. in aid to the police and court systems of Egypt’s military dictatorship, via an opaque “Conflict, Stability...

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Fred Vargas: The Accordionist review - intriguing Gallic sleuthing yarn

Marina Vaizey

The two haunting series of crime ...

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James Hamilton: Gainsborough - A Portrait review - an artistic life told with verve and enthusiasm

Marina Vaizey

James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of...

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Jason Webster: Fatal Sunset review - more flavoursome crime in Valencia

Liz Thomson

The sixth in a series of crime...

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Emma Dibdin: 'Being scared of something is a sign you should write about it'

Emma Dibdin

When I began writing my first novel four years ago, there were a few ideas that had coalesced in my mind. I...

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Teju Cole: Blind Spot review - haunting hybrid of words and images

Boyd Tonkin

As a photographer, Teju Cole has a penchant for the scuffed and distressed surfaces, materials and tools that form rectilinear patterns on construction sites. Opposite a shot of scaffolding,...

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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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latest in today

Natalie Dessay, Philippe Cassard, Milton Court review - flas...

It could have been a winner: a charismatic star soprano of great emotional and interpretative intelligence, a top pianist given a little space to...

Album: Gregory Porter - Christmas Wish

The cat in the hat with the mellifluous voice delivers his Christmas Wish for the festive season, his first Christmas album, and it...

Paul Lewis, Wigmore Hall review - Schubert sonatas revisited...

A decade has passed since Paul Lewis concluded an endeavour of a kind never previously undertaken: to perform, over two and a half years and...

The Homecoming, Young Vic Theatre review - Pinter's dis...

As the audience enters, thick mist envelopes the thrust stage and jazz music fills the...

Blu-ray: Blackhat

The Boxing Day release of Michael Mann’s first feature in eight years, Ferrari, finally follows up Blackhat, a Chris Hemsworth-...

Kin, BBC One review - in Dublin's not-so-fair city

Folklore tends to depict Dublin as a convivial and picturesque city, with a bar on every corner full of revellers on wild stag weekends, but that’...

Voces8 Foundation Choir and Orchestra, Smith, Voces8 Centre...

There’s a game called Whamageddon, where people see how deep into December they can go without hearing “Last Christmas”. I’m like that, but with...

Infinite Life, National Theatre review - beguiling new comed...

A sun deck with seven pale-green padded loungers is the latest setting for the latest...

Rodelinda, The English Concert, Bicket, Saffron Hall review...

If ever a marriage was made in heaven, it would have to be the one between Lucy Crowe’s beleaguered Queen Rodelinda and Iestyn Davies’ King...

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