journalism
Howard Amos: Russia Starts Here review - East meets West, via the Pskov regionTuesday, 01 April 2025![]() 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... Read more... |
Civil War review - God help AmericaFriday, 12 April 2024![]() 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,... Read more... |
Justin Lewis: Don't Stop the Music - A History of Pop Music, One Day at a Time review - deft and delightful pop almanacTuesday, 07 November 2023![]() 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.... Read more... |
Polly Toynbee: An Uneasy Inheritance - My Family and Other Radicals review - looking backMonday, 05 June 2023![]() 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... Read more... |
Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal historySaturday, 11 March 2023![]() 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... Read more... |
Newsies, Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre review - bombastic musical let down by its songsMonday, 12 December 2022![]() 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... Read more... |
Bronwyn Adcock: Currowan review - a fire foretold, a warning deliveredTuesday, 27 September 2022![]() 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... Read more... |
Ride, Charing Cross Theatre review - A true story of female empowermentThursday, 01 September 2022![]() 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... Read more... |
Stanislav Aseyev: In Isolation - Dispatches from Occupied Donbas review - journeys through space and time in UkraineWednesday, 29 June 2022![]() 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-... Read more... |
Blu-ray: La Dolce VitaTuesday, 19 October 2021![]() 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... Read more... |
Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins review - a fitting tribute to a political hellraiserFriday, 23 October 2020![]() 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... Read more... |
Naomi Klein: On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal review - an unapologetic manifestoTuesday, 22 September 2020![]() 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... Read more... |
- 1 of 7
- ››
