book reviews and features
Andrea Bajani: If You Kept a Record of Sins review - where blame, grief and discovery meet
Wednesday, 07 April 2021
“I think it happened to you, too, the first time you arrived.” So begins Andrea Bajani’s second novel (... Read more... |
Will Page: Tarzan Economics - a 'rockonomist' writes
Wednesday, 31 March 2021
The idea behind Tarzan Economics is, in its essence, that “if the vine we are holding onto is withering, we can have confidence to reach out for a new one.” This thesis expounded in Will... Read more... |
Extract: TV by Susan Bordo
Tuesday, 30 March 2021
"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Author Sam Mills on the phenomenon of the 'chauvo-feminist'
Monday, 29 March 2021
Sam Mills’s writing includes the wondrously weird novel The Quiddity of Will Self, the semi-memoir Fragments of My Father, and Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), which... Read more... |
Charles Saumarez Smith: The Art Museum In Modern Times review – the story of modern architecture
Thursday, 25 March 2021
“This book is a journey of historical discovery, set out sequentially in order to convey a sense of what has changed over time.” Add to this sentence, the title of the work from which it is taken... Read more... |
Craig Taylor: New Yorkers - A City and Its People in Our Time review
Monday, 22 March 2021
For the last couple of years, until we were so rudely interrupted, I’d been spending chunks of the year in New York, a city I’ve come to know... Read more... |
Prix Pictet: Confinement review - a year in photographs
Thursday, 18 March 2021
Sustainability and the environment are watchwords for the Prix Pictet, the international... Read more... |
Alan Warner: Kitchenly 434 review – dreams and delusions in the backwaters of fame
Wednesday, 17 March 2021
“They think it’s all drugs and sex up here, Mrs H.” “Bless me.” The reality, at Kitchenly Mill Race, runs more to a nice pot of Tetley’s and a plate of Gypsy Creams. But “people are funny around... Read more... |
Edward St Aubyn: Double Blind review - constructing 'cognition literature'
Tuesday, 16 March 2021
If it weren’t for the warning on the blurb, the first chapter of Double Blind would have you wondering whether you’d ordered something from the... Read more... |
Agustín Fernández Mallo: The Things We've Seen review - degrees of separation
Tuesday, 16 March 2021
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in... Read more... |
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latest in today
Album: Imelda May - 11 Past the Hour
11 Past the Hour opens with its title song, a delicious, twangy, string-laden Nancy Sinatra Bond theme that never was. The album closes...
Singer-songwriter Peggy Seeger: still in the vanguard of her...
If American music has a royal family, it’s surely the Seeger clan. Charles, the patriarch, the composer, musicologist and teacher who could be...
Album: Lady Dan - I Am the Prophet
There’s a line in “No Home”, the staggering centrepiece of Lady Dan’s debut album, that perhaps sums up the project. “Wolves will never...
Reissue CDs Weekly: Wes Montgomery - The NDR Hamburg Studio...
Speaking to America’s Hit Parader magazine in August 1967...
Night in Paradise review - lukewarm bloodbath
Since launching his directing career in 2011 with The Showdown, Park Hoon-jung has established himself as a promising devotee of the...
DVD/Blu-ray: Catch Us If You Can
Catch Us If You Can, the 1965 road movie starring Barbara Ferris and the eponymous drummer and guiding force of the Dave Clark Five,...
Sequin in a Blue Room review - soullessness and sex in Sydne...
Sequin is the screen name for the questing 16-year...
The Seven Deadly Sins / Mahagonny Songspiel, Royal Opera onl...
There are so many good ideas, so much talented hard work from the singers of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and two dancers, such a...
Album: Alan Vega - Mutator
If there’s someone who could claim to have proved Arnold Schoenberg’s pithy phrase “If it is art, it is not for all” it was Alan Vega. His and...