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In 1988, James Birch – curator, art dealer, and gallery owner – took Francis Bacon to Moscow. It was, as he writes, "an unimaginable intrusion of Western Culture into the heart of the Soviet system". At a time of powerful political tension and suspicion, but also optimism and opportunity, the process of exhibiting Bacon was riddled with difficulties, careful negotiations, joys and disappointments.In this extract, we find James in 1988 and perestroika is in full bloom: General Secretary Gorbachev appears to be at the height of his popularity and power, and a possible democracy beckons. James Read more ...

Johanne Lykke Holm’s spellbinding novel Strega recounts one teen’s journey into womanhood. Leaving her parental home to work with eight other girls in a lavish but mouldering hotel, Rafa grapples with what it means to be a woman in a world literally and culturally saturated with gender-based violence.Gothic and mythic in atmosphere, Strega is a novel that fights back, through occult and secular rituals, through a collective of young women who refuse to become dolls, and through its witchy love of things – an enchanted concatenation of lipsticks, liquorice, hairclips and jewellery. Read more ...

Hilary Mantel, who has died at the age of 70, was a maker of literary history. Wolf Hall, an action-packed 650-page brick of a book about the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, won the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Three years later its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, became the first sequel ever to win the prize in its 44-year history. Then came the RSC's stage adaptation of both novels, while the BBC adapted Wolf Hall, with Mark Rylance (pictured below) in the title role. Finally, after a long wait for her fans, came The Mirror & the Light, which followed its predecessors into the Read more ...

"My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream." Batool Haidari’s words give this bold collection of stories its title and epigraph. She is one of 18 writers from the Write Afghanistan project, run by the organisation UNTOLD which works to promote the work of writers in communities marginalised by conflict. This book is the culmination of that two-year project: the first anthology of short stories by Afghan women, written in the languages Dari and Pashton, and translated by Afghan translators.The following Read more ...

On hearing that I had recently written a book about Leonard Cohen, someone asked me why I thought Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature rather than Cohen. Not being a Nobel prize adjudicator I couldn’t answer the question but I did agree that although Leonard Cohen is best known as a singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen was first and foremost a poet extraordinaire.  One of the things that makes listening to him so compelling is that his songs are poems set to music.A hallmark of Leonard Cohen’s musical poetry is its deep spirituality. But unlike most spiritual poetry drawn it Read more ...

For those not familiar with the murkier corners of British rock music history, Barry Adamson was a significant player in creating the post-punk sound of the late 1970s and early 1980s. More musical and nuanced than the primitive punk sound of the Sex Pistols and those who coalesced in their wake, post-punk brought in a broader raft of influences from dub reggae, German motorik sounds and the art school glam rock of Roxy Music and David Bowie. Here Adamson rose to prominence with his bass guitar in such scene titans as Magazine, the Birthday Party and original incarnation of Nick Cave and the Read more ...

In May 1981, a new-minted music graduate newly embarked on a career in journalism, I was pleased as punch to secure a commission from Capital Radio. Forever Young: Dylan at 40 was broadcast on 24 May. I’ve a tape of it somewhere, this 30-minute programme voiced by a guy more suited to Carlsberg ads. The script – written using a golf-ball typewriter, music cues in its wide margins, hints of Tippex here and there – turned up a couple of weeks ago as I tidied my study. I was 23, younger than Bob Dylan when he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and 40 then seemed rather old.Dylan's career was at one of Read more ...

It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage doors of perception, this round-up of recent, new and forthcoming music books surveys an artist roster disparate enough to grace the finest of festival bills.First up is Sam Lee’s Nightingale, a beautifully made hardback, packed with illustrations, facts, stories, lore, and more. While the focus here is avian song and the projective wonders of the Read more ...

“Burglar alarms jangled through the empty hallways of Paradise Block.” In this ramshackle, lonely tenement, such alarms might be one’s only company. Yet, in this intricate collection of short stories, the inhabitants’ lives intertwine. Alice Ash’s debut collection steadily follows the tropes typical of the short story, but the tales overlap, creating a compendium that almost morphs into a novel but retains the unsettling gaps crucial to the genre.Of course, stories collated together in one place often share themes or ideas, but Ash takes this further, picking up characters and motifs from one Read more ...

The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free". In the wide-ranging collection The Good Immigrant USA, editors Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla make it their aim to "finally let immigrants be in charge of their own narrative" as writers and artists from Teju Cole to Jenny Zhang and Chiogizie Obioma to Dani Fernandez Read more ...

A life in art, a life in looking; a life in writing, a life in reading; a life fuelled by passionate emotions, personal attachments and religious turmoil. There are a few artists whose lives are so intertwined with their work that their biography as well as their art achieves a kind of mythic status, but outstanding among them is the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). Despite the fact he only lived for forty years and was a fully practising artist for only seven of those, looking at Van Gogh is a ceaseless endeavour.Even more remarkably, major contributions to the appreciation of Van Gogh Read more ...