book reviews and features
Omar Robert Hamilton: The City Always Wins review - Egypt's revolution, up close and personal
Sunday, 20 August 2017
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... Read more... |
Fred Vargas: The Accordionist review - intriguing Gallic sleuthing yarn
Sunday, 13 August 2017
The two haunting series of crime ... Read more... |
James Hamilton: Gainsborough - A Portrait review - an artistic life told with verve and enthusiasm
Sunday, 06 August 2017
James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of... Read more... |
Jason Webster: Fatal Sunset review - more flavoursome crime in Valencia
Sunday, 06 August 2017
The sixth in a series of crime... Read more... |
Emma Dibdin: 'Being scared of something is a sign you should write about it'
Saturday, 05 August 2017
When I began writing my first novel four years ago, there were a few ideas that had coalesced in my mind. I... Read more... |
Teju Cole: Blind Spot review - haunting hybrid of words and images
Sunday, 30 July 2017
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,... Read more... |
Lisa Jewell: 'I’d never killed anyone before'
Sunday, 30 July 2017
I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - it's not all about the mainstream
Tuesday, 25 July 2017
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... Read more... |
Peter Høeg: The Susan Effect review - Nordic noir turns surreal
Sunday, 23 July 2017
Peter Høeg is still overwhelmingly known for a novel published a quarter of a century ago. Miss Smilla’s... Read more... |
Sarah Hall: Madame Zero review – eerie tales of calamity and change
Sunday, 16 July 2017
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... Read more... |
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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...
Dreaming and Drowning, Bush Theatre - dense and intense mono...
Kwame Owusu’s 55-minute one-hander does...
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...