book reviews and features
Loving Highsmith review - documentary focused on the writer's lighter side
Thursday, 13 April 2023
Since her death in 1995, Patricia Highsmith has prompted three biographies, screeds of often conflicting psychological analysis and now this... Read more... |
Diana Evans: A House for Alice review - lyrical sequel to Ordinary People
Tuesday, 04 April 2023
Diana Evans specialises in houses, their baleful quirks and the meaning of home. In her acclaimed third novel, Ordinary People (2018), formerly happy, black couple Melissa and Michael... Read more... |
Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinking
Saturday, 01 April 2023
In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the... Read more... |
Seraphina Madsen: Aurora review - the tarot won’t save us
Tuesday, 28 March 2023
“There is another world… a way of perceiving that is chaotic and awesome and terrifying,” announces Seraphina Madsen’s cigarillo-smoking, telepathic cat. Lecturing a teenage coven on the art... Read more... |
Margaret Atwood: Old Babes in the Wood review - bookending the short story
Tuesday, 14 March 2023
Margaret Atwood has been writing for sixty years now, and, with her latest publication, she has given us a book... Read more... |
Janet Malcolm: Still Pictures - On Photography and Memory review - a rare glimpse at a guarded personal history
Saturday, 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... Read more... |
Nicole Flattery: Nothing Special review - returning to the Factory
Wednesday, 08 March 2023
It seems that Andy Warhol’s Factory – silver-dusted and populated with tragic, drug-addicted minor... Read more... |
Will Harris: Brother Poem review - writing the poems that could have been
Saturday, 04 March 2023
You shouldn’t always judge a book by its cover, but you can get pretty far with an epigraph. The epigraph to Will Harris’s new collection, Brother Poem (following his T. S. Eliot Prize-... Read more... |
Disbelief - 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (ed. Julia Nemirovskaya) review - writing battle-lines
Thursday, 23 February 2023
On 24th February 2022, when Vladimir Putin launched his “special military operation”, life in Ukraine changed abruptly and in a brutal fashion. Soon the impact of the war was felt around the world... Read more... |
Sally Adee: We Are Electric review - currents that run through us all
Friday, 17 February 2023
All the things going on with me as I type this – fingers moving keys, eye and brain registering characters on my screen, thoughts that will (I hope) generate the next lot of characters – rely on... Read more... |
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latest in today
Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a mu...
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s ...
Album: Mdou Moctar - Funeral for Justice
Despite its title, Mdou Moctar’s new album is no slow-paced mournful dirge. In fact, it is louder, faster and more overtly political than any of...
Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...
Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - ench...
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital...
Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review -...
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world –...
DVD/Blu-Ray: Priscilla
There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just...
Špaček, BBC Philharmonic, Bihlmaier, Bridgewater Hall, Manch...
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming...
Banging Denmark, Finborough Theatre review - lively but conf...
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided his best means of...
Album: Fred Hersch - Silent, Listening
The previous solo piano solo album from Fred Hersch, one of the world’s great...
Music Reissues Weekly: Linda Smith - I So Liked Spring, Noth...
Three years ago, the release of Till Another Time 1988-1996 generated a thumbs up. A compilation of recordings by the Baltimore and/or...