book reviews and features
Peggy Seeger: First Time Ever - A Memoir, review - a remarkable life![]()
Seeger. A name to strike sparks with almost anyone, whether or not they have an interest in folk music... Read more... |
Niall Ferguson: The Square and the Tower review - of groups and power![]()
The controversial historian Niall Ferguson is the author of some dozen books, including substantial... Read more... |
Alan Hollinghurst: The Sparsholt Affair - pictures at an exhibition, with telling gaps![]()
Television has paid its dues to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - rather feebly, with some rotten acting, in Man in an Orange Shirt; brilliantly, with mostly superb... Read more... |
Henning Mankell: After the Fire review - of death and redemption![]()
The dour, reclusive disgraced doctor Fredrik Welin has appeared once before in Henning Mankell’s work, in The... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards 2017: The Winners![]()
At a festive ceremony on Tuesday night at The Hospital Club in central London, the winners... Read more... |
Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul, Memories and the City review – a masterpiece upgraded![]()
Along with Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul now ranks as one of the most illustrious author-trademarked cities in literary history. Yet, as... Read more... |
Roddy Doyle: Smile review - return of the repressed![]()
Although he made his name with the generally upbeat grooves and licks of his Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle has often played Irish family and social life as a blues full of sorrow and regret. In... Read more... |
Claire Tomalin: A Life of My Own review - the biographer on herself![]()
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted... Read more... |
Anne Applebaum: Red Famine review - hope around a heart of darkness![]()
Hands both sensitive and surgical are needed to guide a reader into the heart of the 20th century’s second biggest genocide and out again. Anne Applebaum is the right person for a... Read more... |
Adam Macqueen: The Lies of the Land review - light, but enlightening![]()
We are now firmly in the post-truth era as defined by Oxford Dictionaries: "adjective - relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping... Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
The future of Arts Journalism
You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!
We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d
And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.
latest in today

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...

On the eve of recording an album at Real World Studios, guitarist Adrian Utley and the American trumpet player Eddie Henderson brought their “...

Wow, can it really be 40 years since Solitude Standing, the second studio album by Suzanne Vega who put the 1980s folk revival on the map...

“Sandra” is one of my favourite tracks from my album Between The Moon and the Milkman which was released last year. While living in...

Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but...

When Giuseppe Torelli made the journey from his birthplace of Verona to Bologna in the late 17th century, the trumpet was still seen as something...

"Julie's story takes place everywhere", says the writer-director Leonardo Van Dijl, whose psychological drama Julie Keeps Quiet has...

Over its crisp 32 minutes and nine songs, Altogether Stranger embraces electropop, lo-fi terrain and gothic solo contemplation. By...

Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic....

Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters....