book reviews and features
Bruno Maçães: The Dawn of Eurasia review - middle of nowhere
Sunday, 21 January 2018
Part travelogue and part broad analysis of the current and future challenges facing the EU, the premise of Bruno Maçães’s new book The Dawn of Eurasia is to “use travel to provide an... Read more... |
David Lodge: Writer’s Luck - A Memoir 1976-1991 review - literary days, in detail
Sunday, 14 January 2018
Metaphor, metonymy, simile and synecdoche, anyone? FR Leavis, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode? If any of this, and more, turns you on, this lengthy... Read more... |
Nick Coleman: Voices - How a Great Singer Can Change Your Life, review - earworms explored
Sunday, 14 January 2018
Readers familiar with Nick Coleman’s 2012 memoir The Train in the Night will know before embarking on this book that the author suffered the worst possible fate for a music journalist:... Read more... |
Best of 2017: Books
Sunday, 31 December 2017
With a clownish bully currently installed in the White House, the 2017 Man Booker Prize aptly went to a... Read more... |
Nicholas Blincoe: Bethlehem - Biography of a Town review - too few wise men but remarkable women
Saturday, 23 December 2017
Suitably enough, Nicholas Blincoe begins his personal ... Read more... |
Jenny Uglow: Mr Lear - A Life of Art and Nonsense review - a lonely Victorian life, so richly illustrated
Sunday, 17 December 2017
Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (1812-1888) is a meander, almost day by day, through the long and... Read more... |
Naum Kleiman: Eisenstein on Paper review - a lavish journey into the unconscious
Sunday, 17 December 2017
"From drawing, via the theatre, to the cinema". Naum Kleiman's introductory qualification of Sergey Eisenstein's own self-perceived line in his Film Form is one that he follows in a... Read more... |
Jaron Lanier: Dawn of the New Everything review - pioneer of virtual reality tells his story
Sunday, 17 December 2017
Jaron Lanier has quite a story to tell. From a teenage flute-playing goat-herd in New Mexico... Read more... |
Rachel Hewitt: A Revolution of Feeling review - from passions to emotions
Sunday, 10 December 2017
Utopias have a way of going up in flames. Rachel Hewitt’s new book, A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind, charts the revolutionary fervour and disappointment... Read more... |
Reza Aslan: God - A Human History review - on being 'sapiens', and believing
Sunday, 03 December 2017
It is not just the season of holidays and holy days in the monotheistic ... 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...
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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...