fri 29/03/2024

book reviews and features

Sigrid Rausing: Mayhem review - you want it darker?

Sebastian Scotney

There is fictional Nordic noir. And then there is this, the real thing. Subject matter really couldn’t be much darker than that of Mayhem: A Memoir in which publisher,...

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Val McDermid: Insidious Intent review - dark and expert crime writing

Marina Vaizey

Val McDermid has written close on 30 award-winning thrillers and suspense novels, in four series, since...

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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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"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to...

The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Marylebone Theatre review - f...

Like all great literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final, eccentric, playfully wondrous short story seems to have been written just for us – across...

Bach's Easter Oratorio, OAE, Whelan, QEH review - the j...

Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter...

Album: Jane Weaver - Love In Constant Spectacle

“Motif,” Love In Constant Spectacle’s fourth track, is the closest Jane Weaver has come in over a decade to the folk influences embraced...

First Person: author-turned-actor Lydia Higman on a play tha...

I first read Anne Gunter’s story about five years ago, when I was in my first year of university at Oxford, little knowing it would over time lead...

The Origin of Evil review - Laure Calamy stars in gripping F...

A young woman (Laure Calamy; Call my Agent!; Full Time; Her Way) is trying to pluck up the courage to call her...

Foam, Finborough Theatre review - fascism and f*cking in a G...

In a too brightly tiled Gentlemen’s public convenience (Nitin Parmar’s beautifully realised set is as much a character as any of the men we meet...

Album: Ride - Interplay

What a time to be alive it is for fans of late Eighties, early Nineties ...

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