tue 21/03/2023

book reviews and features

Richard Adams: 'If I'd known how well I could write I’d have started earlier'

Jasper Rees

Richard Adams, who has died at the age of 96, was the high priest of anthropomorphism. Much his most famous and loved novel is his first, Watership Down, published when he...

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Christmas Book: When Broadway Went to Hollywood

David Nice

Tinseltown's relationship to its more sophisticated, older New York brother is analogous to Ethan Mordden's engagement by Oxford University Press. The presentation is a sober, if slim, academic...

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Sunday Book: Treasure Palaces - Great Writers Visit Great Museums

Florence Hallett

The modern experience of visiting museums is so far from the hushed contemplation envisaged by our Victorian forebears that the very idea is sufficient to induce a rosy glow of nostalgia, as...

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Sunday Book: Ruth Franklin - Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

Markie Robson-Scott

When asked about her most famous short story, "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson said, “I hate it. I’ve lived with that thing 15 years. Nobody will ever let me forget it.” Sixty-eight years later, it’...

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Shirley Jackson: A Rising Star at 100

Laurence Jackso

My mother has been rediscovered, if she ever went away. She is suddenly a rising star, 51 years after her early death. Interest in Shirley Jackson’s novels and stories has blossomed significantly...

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Sunday Book: Günter Grass - Of All That Ends

Boyd Tonkin

In this, his final book, the late German author and Nobel literature laureate tells us that he used to disgust his children with offal-heavy dishes rooted in the peasant fare of his forebears. As...

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Carols From King's: How a tradition was made

alexandra Coghlan

For the first decade of its life, King’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols remained a local phenomenon, a “gift to the City of Cambridge”. But that all changed in 1928 with the first BBC...

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Sunday Book: Lynne Truss - The Lunar Cats

Matthew Wright

Once they’ve died nine times, Lynne Truss’s evil talking cats become immortal. Whether Truss has such ambitions for the literary lifespan of her curiously addictive feline thrillers,...

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Sunday Book: The New Yorker Book of the 60s

Liz Thomson

As the United States – and the world – agonises over the coming of Donald Trump, it seems to many of us that all hope is almost irretrievably lost. How timely, then, is the publication of a...

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Sunday Book: Zadie Smith - Swing Time

Boyd Tonkin

In his lovely memoir My Father’s Fortune, Michael Frayn dubs the Holloway and Caledonian Roads the “Tigris and Euphrates” of his family history. In that case, just a few pages west...

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Pages

latest in today

The Beasts review - a countryside idyll loses its charm

The Beasts (As Bestas) is all of two hours and 17 minutes long, and yet to look away is never an option. ...

Dance of Death, National Theatre of Norway, Coronet Theatre...

You don’t have to be Scandinavian to act out Strindberg’s fantastical extremes at the highest level, but I’ve not seen any British performers come...

Allelujah review - Alan Bennett put through the blender

I'm proffering just a tad less than three cheers for Allelujah, the film version of...

Turandot, Royal Opera review - spectacle and sound wow in th...

Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my...

The Way Old Friends Do, Park Theatre review - sweet, but fli...

Is it a good idea to work with your spouse? The Way Old Friends Do, a love letter to ABBA tribute bands – which...

Album: Cécile McLorin Salvant - Mélusine

In European folklore, mélusine are woman from the waist up and fish or serpent below. The fabled character is first known in the 13th century....

Music Reissues Weekly: Duffy Power - Innovations, Live At Th...

Sometime in early October 1963 John Lennon and Paul McCartney encountered The Rolling Stones and offered them one of their songs; one which became...

Blu-ray: Saraband for Dead Lovers

The 17th century romantic tragedy Saraband for Dead Lovers (1948), Ealing Studios' first Technicolor film, was conceived as a magnificent...

Amidon, Clayton, SCO, Kuusisto, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh...

On paper, the formula shouldn’t be that special. Really good music played by really good people is hardly a groundbreaking concept...

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