book reviews and features
Cate Haste: Passionate Spirit - The Life of Alma Mahler review - a racy life pacily narrated
Sunday, 16 June 2019
Charismatic, full of vital elan to the end, inconsistent, fitfully creative, a casually anti-semitic Conservative Catholic married to two of the greatest Jewish artists, Alma Mahler/Gropius/Werfel... Read more... |
Anthony B. Atkinson: Measuring Poverty Around the World review - first, second and third world problems
Sunday, 09 June 2019
Five years ago, when the world was still reeling from 2008 and Britain from the swinging axe of George Osborne, Thomas Piketty’s Capital was an unlikely bestseller. It was a book probably... Read more... |
Vasily Grossman: Stalingrad review - a Soviet national epic
Sunday, 02 June 2019
Stalingrad is the companion piece to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which on... Read more... |
Hiromi Kawakami: The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino review - Don Juan as a salaryman
Sunday, 26 May 2019
My first, beguiling taste of Hiromi Kawakami’s fiction came when, in 2014, I and my fellow-judges shortlisted Strange Weather in Tokyo for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. That... Read more... |
Thomas Harris: Cari Mora review – mayhem in Miami
Sunday, 19 May 2019
This March, a real-estate office in Miami Beach, Florida, put a parcel of prime seafront land on the market. A vacant estate with plans filed for a luxury mansion, the plot at 5860 North Bay Road... Read more... |
Mike Jay: Mescaline - A Global History of the First Psychedelic review - multiple perspectives
Sunday, 12 May 2019
Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to... Read more... |
Ben Okri, Brighton Festival 2019 review - adventures in writing
Wednesday, 08 May 2019
If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival... Read more... |
Leah Hazard: Hard Pushed review - a midwife's tales
Sunday, 05 May 2019
This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is... Read more... |
Clare Carlisle: Philosopher of the Heart review – how to be human
Sunday, 28 April 2019
How close should a biographer come to her subject? Clare Carlisle stays by the side, and looks through the eyes, of Søren Kierkegaard at almost every step on his maverick journey. Philosopher... Read more... |
Banine: Days in the Caucasus review - revolutions, pogroms and love
Sunday, 21 April 2019
By fifteen Ummulbanu Asadullayeva — or Banine, to call her by the name under which she wrote and translated — had already lived more than most of us will in a lifetime. She’d experienced great... Read more... |
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latest in today
Ridout, Włoszczowska, Crawford, Lai, Posner, Wigmore Hall re...
Advice to young musicians, as given at several “how to market your career” seminars: don’t begin a biography with “one of the finest xxxs of his/...
Stephen review - a breathtakingly good first feature by a mu...
Stephen is the first feature film by multi-media artist Melanie Manchot and it’s the best debut film I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s ...
Album: Mdou Moctar - Funeral for Justice
Despite its title, Mdou Moctar’s new album is no slow-paced mournful dirge. In fact, it is louder, faster and more overtly political than any of...
Blue Lights Series 2, BBC One review - still our best cop sh...
The first season of Blue Nights was so close to ...
Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - ench...
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital...
Jonn Elledge: A History of the World in 47 Borders review -...
In A History of the World in 47 Borders, Jonn Elledge takes an ostensibly dry subject – how maps and boundaries have shaped our world –...
DVD/Blu-Ray: Priscilla
There’s a scene in Priscilla where Elvis stands above his wife, who is scrambling to put her clothes in a suitcase. Priscilla has just...
Špaček, BBC Philharmonic, Bihlmaier, Bridgewater Hall, Manch...
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming...
Banging Denmark, Finborough Theatre review - lively but conf...
What would happen if a notorious misogynist actually fell in love? With a glacial Danish librarian? And decided his best means of...
Album: Fred Hersch - Silent, Listening
The previous solo piano solo album from Fred Hersch, one of the world’s great...