book reviews and features
Sunday Book: The New Yorker Book of the 60s
Sunday, 20 November 2016
As the United States – and the world – agonises over the coming of Donald Trump, it seems to many of us that all hope is almost irretrievably lost. How timely, then, is the publication of a... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Zadie Smith - Swing Time
Sunday, 13 November 2016
In his lovely memoir My Father’s Fortune, Michael Frayn dubs the Holloway and Caledonian Roads the “Tigris and Euphrates” of his family history. In that case, just a few pages west... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Elena Ferrante - Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey
Sunday, 06 November 2016
The 2003 first, Italian edition of La Frantumaglia begins with words from Elena Ferrante’s publisher, Edizioni E/O, about why the book of collected writings was published: “To satisfy the... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Haruki Murakami - Absolutely on Music
Sunday, 30 October 2016
Every fan of his fiction knows that Haruki Murakami loves jazz and lets the music play throughout his books. Yet in this 320-page dialogue between the novelist and his equally eminent compatriot,... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Alan Bennett - Keeping On Keeping On
Sunday, 23 October 2016
To settle down on a darkening evening with a new volume of Alan Bennett is to be in the company of an old friend. Someone you don’t see as often as you’d like but with whom you immediately pick up... Read more... |
Harriet Walter on Brutus and Other Heroines
Sunday, 23 October 2016
A part we have played is like a person we once met, grew to know, became intimately enmeshed with and finally moved away from. Some of these characters remain friends, others are like ex-lovers... Read more... |
Sunday Book: I Am Brian Wilson
Sunday, 16 October 2016
For decades Brian Wilson was depicted as the mad, lost genius of the Beach Boys, but these days, at 74, he's looking more like one of pop's great survivors. After all, he has comprehensively... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Carlo Rovelli - Reality Is Not What It Seems
Sunday, 16 October 2016
Scientists today tend to patronise the early Greek philosophers who, 2500 years ago, inaugurated enquiry into the nature of things. The Atomic Theory? A lucky guess, they allege. But Carlo Rovelli... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Garrison Keillor
Monday, 27 June 2016
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and has been for the past 42 years, ever since Garrison Keillor first reported on the town's goings-on in his weekly radio show A Prairie Home Companion... Read more... |
Who was St Clair Bayfield?
Thursday, 05 May 2016
This week Stephen Frears's film about Florence Foster Jenkins opens. It will bring to the widest attention yet the story of a New York socialite who couldn’t sing and yet did sing, infamously, to... 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.
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Quoted in an early music press article on his band Chapterhouse, singer-guitarist Stephen Patman said their ambition was “to have our records on...