thu 06/11/2025

book reviews and features

Marcel Proust: Letters to the Lady Upstairs - a very slim volume

Sebastian Scotney

Marcel Proust was a prolific letter-writer. He wrote tens of thousands of them, and at speed, as can be seen from the two facsimiles which are included with the text of Letters to the Lady...

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Philip Pullman: La Belle Sauvage review - not quite equal

Katherine Waters

La Belle Sauvage, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s eagerly-awaited new trilogy The Book of Dust, opens in the Trout, a rambling Thames-side pub on the outskirts of Port...

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Peggy Seeger: First Time Ever - A Memoir, review - a remarkable life

Liz Thomson

Seeger. A name to strike sparks with almost anyone, whether or not they have an interest in folk music...

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Niall Ferguson: The Square and the Tower review - of groups and power

Marina Vaizey

The controversial historian Niall Ferguson is the author of some dozen books, including substantial...

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Alan Hollinghurst: The Sparsholt Affair - pictures at an exhibition, with telling gaps

David Nice

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...

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Henning Mankell: After the Fire review - of death and redemption

Marina Vaizey

The dour, reclusive disgraced doctor Fredrik Welin has appeared once before in Henning Mankell’s work, in The...

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h.Club 100 Awards 2017: The Winners

theartsdesk

At a festive ceremony on Tuesday night at The Hospital Club in central London, the winners...

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Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul, Memories and the City review – a masterpiece upgraded

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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Roddy Doyle: Smile review - return of the repressed

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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Claire Tomalin: A Life of My Own review - the biographer on herself

Marina Vaizey

The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted...

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