book reviews and features
Music books to end lockdown: Sam Lee, Hawkwind, Dylan, Richard Thompson, and the Electric Muses
Friday, 14 May 2021
It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and... Read more... |
Sam Riviere: Dead Souls review – whip-smart literary satire with a techno tinge
Thursday, 13 May 2021
In 1992 Martin Amis published a story, “Career Move”, in which the writers of sensational screenplays with titles like Decimator and Offensive from Qasar 13 read their work to... Read more... |
Lucy Caldwell: Intimacies review - exploring the empty spaces
Wednesday, 12 May 2021
In the first short story of Lucy Caldwell’s collection Intimacies, “Like This”, one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to a parent occurs. On the spur of a stressful... Read more... |
Maylis de Kerangal: Painting Time review - safer in simulation
Tuesday, 11 May 2021
"Trompe-l’œil," explains the director of the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, “is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is... Read more... |
The Pursuit of Love, BBC One review - extravagantly entertaining
Monday, 10 May 2021
Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious... Read more... |
Sunjeev Sahota: China Room review - separate, related lives
Monday, 10 May 2021
China Room, Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, is a familiar, ancestral tale: the... Read more... |
Extract: Blackface by Ayanna Thompson
Thursday, 06 May 2021
Nearly a year has passed since George Floyd was killed by... Read more... |
Kate Lebo: The Book of Difficult Fruit review - a rich, juicy delight
Tuesday, 27 April 2021
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it... Read more... |
Michael Spitzer: The Musical Human review - charting our age-old relationship with music
Wednesday, 21 April 2021
Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become.... Read more... |
Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott: Failures of State review - a devastating exposé, slightly mistimed
Wednesday, 14 April 2021
Almost a year ago, in the midst of the first national lockdown, The Sunday Times broke the news that Boris Johnson had failed to attend five consecutive Cobra meetings in the lead up to... Read more... |
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latest in today
Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - a perfo...
This greatest of symphonies starts with what’s plausibly described as arrhythmia of the heart, so it shouldn’t have been surprising to find my own...
Album: We Were Promised Jetpacks - A Complete One-Eighty
We Were Promised Jetpacks is a band name that seems off the cuff at first glance. This could be said for the Scottish...
Three Minutes: A Lengthening review - superb portrait of a v...
We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch...
Music Reissues Weekly: Trevor Beales - Fireside Stories
When Trevor Beales’s band Havana Lake released their only album in 1977, it was on a label which also issued records by The Ryman Country Band,...
Directors the Dardenne brothers: 'To be living means to...
Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have made their home region of Liège the site of excruciating moral crises and crushing injustice....
Manchester Collective String Orchestra, RNCM, Manchester rev...
Manchester Collective’s string orchestra programme, opening last night at the Royal Northern College of Music and touring to the South Bank, Leeds...
Best of Enemies, Noel Coward Theatre review - opposites attr...
Opposition (and history) are the apparent mainstays of the ceaselessly busy...
Album: Camilla Pisani - Phant[as]
Want an antidote so forced seasonal cheer and the catchiness of Christmas pop? How about some almost entirely atonal...
Tori and Lokita review - a masterpiece of humanist cinema
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes are Belgium’s national conscience. The brothers, who have been sharing the roles of writer-director-producer since...