book reviews and features
Andrey Kurkov: Grey Bees review - light Ukrainian odyssey, with bite
Wednesday, 18 November 2020
This time, the Ukrainian author of Death and the Penguin, known for his brilliantly dark humour,... Read more... |
Book extract: Nativity by Jean Frémon, with drawings by Louise BourgeoisMonday, 16 November 2020
How should one paint the baby Jesus? This deceptively innocent question runs the length of Jean Frémon's Nativity, a fictional work that takes as its subject the first painter to... Read more... |
Ben Wilson: Metropolis - A History of Humankind's Greatest Invention review - urban resilience throughout the ages
Tuesday, 10 November 2020
Like the novel, painting and God, the city has long been pronounced dead – along with a few other things, like civil politics, society and the art of conversation that were said to have thrived... Read more... |
Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology review - wild writing to stimulate the senses
Wednesday, 28 October 2020
Among the French composer Claude Debussy’s greatest and characteristically subtle innovations was to put the titles at the end of his pieces. He did this in his piano collection Preludes... Read more... |
Judith Herrin: Ravenna review - flashes of order and beauty in a chaotic world
Monday, 26 October 2020
Anyone mesmerized by the mosaics in seven of Ravenna’s eight Unesco world heritage sites may be surprised by the... Read more... |
Jenny Hval: Girls Against God review - a sticky dance through space and time
Wednesday, 21 October 2020
Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God covers every angsty young woman’s favourite subjects. Witchcraft, heavy... Read more... |
10 Questions for Poet and Critic Rebecca Tamás
Tuesday, 20 October 2020
Strangers: Essays on the Human and Nonhuman is a powerful invitation to rethink, to doubt and to engage. Beginning among the Diggers’ tilled earth in 1649 and the eco-socialist "... Read more... |
The Secret History of My Library: Essay by Daniel Saldaña París
Wednesday, 14 October 2020
Books lost, left in houses I never returned to; dictionaries mislaid during a move; seven boxes sold to a second-hand bookstore… The history of my library is the history of loss and an impossible... Read more... |
Dolly Alderton: Ghosts review - a love story beyond romance
Tuesday, 13 October 2020
There’s something simultaneously cringey and also addictive about Dolly Alderton’s prose. Ghosts is definitely... Read more... |
Richard J Evans: The Hitler Conspiracies review – Nazi myths debunked
Monday, 12 October 2020
In the days when crowds still thronged airport bookshops, any work entitled The Hitler Conspiracies would surely leap off the shelves. This one ought to flourish in our more immobile... Read more... |
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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
The Fifth Step, Soho Place review - wickedly funny two-hande...
The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter....
Josefowicz, LSO, Mälkki, Barbican review - two old favourite...
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two...
Mr Swallow: Show Pony, Richmond Theatre review - magic trick...
Nick Mohammed invented his Mr Swallow character – camp, lisping, with an inflated ego and the mistaken belief that he has creative...
The Great Escape Festival 2025, Brighton review - a feast of...
Photographer Finetime and I have our first pints outside Dalton’s, a bar on...
Parsifal, Glyndebourne review - the music flies up, the dram...
There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and old actor versions...
The Bombing of Pan Am 103, BBC One review - new dramatisatio...
The appalling destruction of Pan Am’s flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was put under the spotlight in January this year in Sky Atlantic’s ...
Ballet to Broadway: Wheeldon Works, Royal Ballet review - th...
Ballet is hardly a stranger to Broadway. Until the late 1950s every other musical had its fantasy ballet sequence – think Cyd Charisse in ...
Album: Robert Forster - Strawberries
“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during Strawberries' “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not, however,...
Music Reissues Weekly: Chapterhouse - White House Demos
Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on...