wed 02/04/2025

journalism

Howard Amos: Russia Starts Here review - East meets West, via the Pskov region

Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire, the journalist Howard Amos’ first book, is a prescient and fascinating examination of the borderlands of a bellicose nation. Focusing on the Pskov region, which juts out into eastern Europe, his...

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Civil War review - God help America

Alex Garland’s fourth movie as writer/director is a chilling glimpse of an American dystopia, fortuitously timed for the run-up to the forthcoming US elections. However, it steers fastidiously clear of drawing any obvious Trump vs Biden parallels,...

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Justin Lewis: Don't Stop the Music - A History of Pop Music, One Day at a Time review - deft and delightful pop almanac

This splendid book proves that trivia need not be trivial, and that a miscellany of apparently disconnected facts can cohere, if done well. It is in the proud lineage of the “toilet book”, a form sadly in decline in these days of the smartphone....

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Polly Toynbee: An Uneasy Inheritance - My Family and Other Radicals review - looking back

There are few contemporary journalists whose names are instantly familiar – and usually it’s for the wrong reasons. Polly Toynbee occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of all those on the left. To those on the right, she is among the most...

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Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history

For almost half a century, from the mid-1960s until her death in 2021, Janet Malcolm was a staff writer on the New Yorker where her meticulous reporting and provocatively strong opinions won a devoted readership. Yet she began her career as a kind...

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Newsies, Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre review - bombastic musical let down by its songs

What do you mean you haven’t heard of the newsboys’ strike of 1899? It’s a classic David and Goliath story: a group of New York kids selling newspapers for Joseph Pulitzer (him of the prize), who take a stand when their boss tries to charge them 20...

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Bronwyn Adcock: Currowan review - a fire foretold, a warning delivered

In 2019 Australia endured the hottest, driest year since records began and their bushfire season escalated with unprecedented intensity. The fires and pyro-connective storms that swept the country claimed 33 lives (and a further 400 from smoke...

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Ride, Charing Cross Theatre review - A true story of female empowerment

Who tells your story? Something of a theme in new musicals since Hamilton posed the question in those long ago pre-Covid, pre-inflation days. In Ride, the once famous cyclist who had hardly ever ridden a bike, Annie Londonderry, circumvents the...

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Stanislav Aseyev: In Isolation - Dispatches from Occupied Donbas review - journeys through space and time in Ukraine

Stanislav Aseyev is a Ukrainian writer who came in from the cold. Until the spring of 2014, he was an aspiring poet and novelist based in the eastern Donbas region: when, however, its main city and surrounding area fell under the control of pro-...

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Blu-ray: La Dolce Vita

One of those films weighed down by a considerable reputation, La Dolce Vita (1960) is rarely taken as seriously as it should be. From the very first sequence in which a figure of Christ sails across Rome’s skies, suspended from a helicopter, a...

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Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins review - a fitting tribute to a political hellraiser

It’s a brave film distributor who releases a documentary about an American journalist in the UK at the best of times, let alone in the middle of a pandemic, so first salute goes to Eve Gabereau at Modern Films for giving Raise Hell a...

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Naomi Klein: On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal review - an unapologetic manifesto

On Fire brings together a decade’s worth of dispatches from the frontline of the climate disaster – spanning the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill (“a violent wound in the living organism that is Earth itself”), devastating tropical cyclones in Puerto...

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