tue 20/05/2025

book reviews and features

Neil MacGregor: Living with the Gods review - focuses of belief

Marina Vaizey

Dip in, dip out, argue, agree and disagree: Living with the Gods is the newest manifestation of a rich multimedia format that keeps on giving, devised by that superb writer and lecturer,...

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Lavinia Greenlaw: In the City of Love’s Sleep review - curated lives

Katherine Waters


Iris is a museum conservator with a pair of pre-adolescent daughters and a failing marriage. Raif...

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Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead review - on vengeful nature

Katherine Waters

In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible...

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Michael Hughes: Country review - epic troubles

Matthew Wright

Michael Hughes’ second novel, superimposing the post-96 Troubles on the story of The Iliad, rides a wave of Homeric re-tellings, with Pat Barker and Colm Tóibín having recently...

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Yuval Noah Harari: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century review - a sceptic's optimism?

Marina Vaizey

The bestseller Sapiens (2011, first published in English in 2014) by the hitherto little-known Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari has sold enormously well, and justly so: recommended by...

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P.E.Caquet: The Bell of Treason review - the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia

Jasper Rees

It was 80 years ago next month that Neville Chamberlain returned with the good news of peace in our time...

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h 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - other stories, other voices

Boyd Tonkin

If history repeats itself, better hope that it corrects its mistakes as well. This year’s nominations for the...

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Roger Scruton: Music as an Art review - how to listen?

Marina Vaizey

Hegel, Kant, David Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Leibniz are all adduced, referred to, and paraphrased, and that’s just for starters. Add Rameau, Schubert, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten and the...

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Annie Ernaux: The Years, review - time’s flow

Katherine Waters

“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The...

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Rachel Heng: Suicide Club review - skin-deep dystopia

Katherine Waters

When Lea is nervous she picks at the skin near the nail of her thumb. When she draws blood the wound repairs instantly because she is a member of the Second Wave endowed with SmartBlood™ and...

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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...

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The plays of David Ireland have a tendency to build to an explosion, after long stretches of caustic dialogue and very funny banter....

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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...

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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...

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