book reviews and features
Peggy Seeger: First Time Ever - A Memoir, review - a remarkable life
Sunday, 22 October 2017
Seeger. A name to strike sparks with almost anyone, whether or not they have an interest in folk music... Read more... |
Niall Ferguson: The Square and the Tower review - of groups and power
Sunday, 15 October 2017
The controversial historian Niall Ferguson is the author of some dozen books, including substantial... Read more... |
Alan Hollinghurst: The Sparsholt Affair - pictures at an exhibition, with telling gaps
Sunday, 08 October 2017
Television has paid its dues to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act - rather feebly, with some rotten acting, in Man in an Orange Shirt; brilliantly, with mostly superb... Read more... |
Henning Mankell: After the Fire review - of death and redemption
Sunday, 08 October 2017
The dour, reclusive disgraced doctor Fredrik Welin has appeared once before in Henning Mankell’s work, in The... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards 2017: The Winners
Wednesday, 04 October 2017
At a festive ceremony on Tuesday night at The Hospital Club in central London, the winners... Read more... |
Orhan Pamuk: Istanbul, Memories and the City review – a masterpiece upgraded
Sunday, 01 October 2017
Along with Balzac’s Paris and Dickens’s London, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul now ranks as one of the most illustrious author-trademarked cities in literary history. Yet, as... Read more... |
Roddy Doyle: Smile review - return of the repressed
Sunday, 24 September 2017
Although he made his name with the generally upbeat grooves and licks of his Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle has often played Irish family and social life as a blues full of sorrow and regret. In... Read more... |
Claire Tomalin: A Life of My Own review - the biographer on herself
Sunday, 24 September 2017
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted... Read more... |
Anne Applebaum: Red Famine review - hope around a heart of darkness
Sunday, 17 September 2017
Hands both sensitive and surgical are needed to guide a reader into the heart of the 20th century’s second biggest genocide and out again. Anne Applebaum is the right person for a... Read more... |
Adam Macqueen: The Lies of the Land review - light, but enlightening
Sunday, 17 September 2017
We are now firmly in the post-truth era as defined by Oxford Dictionaries: "adjective - relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping... Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
The future of Arts Journalism
You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!
We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d
And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
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...