book reviews and features
Dr Michael Scott: How to make the most of globalisation
Sunday, 29 January 2017
The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Tessa Hadley - Bad Dreams
Sunday, 22 January 2017
In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “... Read more... |
Sunday Book: James Lee Burke - The Jealous Kind
Sunday, 15 January 2017
In the heat of a Texas summer, Aaron Holland Broussard comes of age. It’s 1952: the two world wars still cast their long shadows and, far away, the Americans are fighting the Russians in a... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Michel Houellebecq - Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013
Sunday, 08 January 2017
The American poet-critic Randall Jarrell once entitled a collection of essays A Sad Heart at the Supermarket. He might have enjoyed Michel Houellebecq’s poem “Hypermarket - November”. Its... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Nadeem Aslam - The Golden Legend
Sunday, 01 January 2017
Elegant literary romance and contemporary jihadism are unlikely bedfellows. Yet British-Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam has now written a third novel combining the two. While The... Read more... |
Richard Adams: 'If I'd known how well I could write I’d have started earlier'
Wednesday, 28 December 2016
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... Read more... |
Christmas Book: When Broadway Went to Hollywood
Saturday, 24 December 2016
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... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Treasure Palaces - Great Writers Visit Great Museums
Sunday, 18 December 2016
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... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Ruth Franklin - Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Sunday, 11 December 2016
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’... Read more... |
Shirley Jackson: A Rising Star at 100
Tuesday, 06 December 2016
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... Read more... |
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Laughing Boy, Jermyn Street Theatre review - impassioned agi...
On the morning of the press show of Laughing Boy, the BBC news website’s top story was about the abuse of children with learning...