book reviews and features
Mark Townsend: No Return review - a masterclass in journalism
Wednesday, 08 April 2020
When Amer Deghayes departed for Syria in a truck leaving from Birmingham, a worker from a youth arts organisation in Brighton had been trying to get in touch with him. She wanted to inform Amer,... Read more... |
Oliver Craske: Indian Sun, The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar review - a master receives masterly treatment
Thursday, 02 April 2020
Ravi Shankar was one of the giants of 20th century music. A... Read more... |
Fitzcarraldo Editions wins Republic of Consciousness Prize
Tuesday, 31 March 2020
South London-based publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions has once more been awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize,... Read more... |
Sam Bourne: To Kill a Man review – the woman who fought back
Sunday, 29 March 2020
Assassinate the President! Obliterate history by torching libraries and murdering historians! Crazy leaders and fake news are just a few of the subjects tackled by political journalist and... Read more... |
Nathalie Léger: The White Dress review – masterfully introverted
Sunday, 22 March 2020
Nathalie Léger’s The White Dress brings personal and public tragedy together in a narrative as absorbingly melancholic as its subject is shocking. The story described by Léger’s narrator... Read more... |
Samuel Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women review – the literary titan laid bare
Sunday, 22 March 2020
That any writer “struggling to make ends meet” would apply themselves to the making of Dream of Fair to Middling Women is something of a complexity. Written in ... Read more... |
Brendan Cleary, Great Eastern, Brighton review – last orders
Thursday, 19 March 2020
St. Patrick’s Day, and socialising itself, has been all but cancelled. But... Read more... |
Christopher Booker: Groupthink review – an uncritical history of political correctness
Sunday, 15 March 2020
“Groupthink”, according to Christopher Booker, is “one of the most valuable guides to collective human behaviour we have ever been given.” But what is it exactly? It begins Booker’s final,... Read more... |
Emma Glass: Rest and Be Thankful review – fiction from the paediatric front-line
Sunday, 15 March 2020
How do you prevent a sick baby in a high-care cubicle, his frail chest swamped in secretions, from drowning in his own “loose mucus”? Remove a suction catheter from its wrapping and insert it... Read more... |
Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs review - a book of two halves
Sunday, 15 March 2020
Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a true novel of two halves and is (excuse the pun) a bit of a curate’s egg. Kawakami’s bio at the beginning of the text explains that the novel was... Read more... |
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latest in today
Picnic at the Castle review - entertaining mixed bill
Of all the outdoor spaces being utilised to keep live performance going in this maddest of years, Warwick Castle is surely among the most striking...
Nocturnal review - an impossible love
The most painterly and ominous sequence in Nocturnal naturally occurs at night. Until recently strangers, 33-year-old Pete (Cosmo Jarvis...
Album: Alicia Keys - Alicia
Alicia Keys is a puzzling mixture. On the one hand she’s the hyper-achieving, multi-platinum, 752-Grammy-winning...
Rocks review - impressively well-crafted neo-realist drama
Rocks is a beautifully made slice of neo-realist filmmaking which deserves to get a wide audience but may well slip off the radar in the...
GogolFest:Dream review - the best music festival of the summ...
GogolFest:Dream in Kherson, somewhere near the Crimea in...
Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall/Hill Quartet, Bandstand Chamber Fes...
An early hero of lockdown, livestreaming from his Berlin home in terrible sound at first, Igor Levit is a supreme example of how adaptable...
The Devil All The Time review – a test of faith in a Souther...
There’s no denying the Faulknerian ambition to the construction of Anthony Campos’ latest feature Devil All the Time...
Eavesdropping on Rattle, the LSO and Bartók’s Bluebeard
One source of advance information told us to expect a reduced version of...
Album: Fish - Weltschmerz
"This party's over" snarls Fish on Weltschmerz, and, this time, it seems the big man really means...
Alban Gerhardt, Markus Becker, Wigmore Hall review - long sh...
It wouldn’t be true to say I’d forgotten what a solo cello in a...