book reviews and features
My Enemy's Cherry Tree: Wang Ting-Kuo review - a masterpiece from Taiwan
Sunday, 07 April 2019
Early every evening, Miss Baixiu comes to sit in an isolated café. She is the daughter of Luo Yiming, the respected employee of a successful commercial bank in charge of loans throughout central... Read more... |
Ali Smith: Spring review – green shoots, dark fears
Sunday, 31 March 2019
Stopped in the street for a vox pop by a BBC interviewer keen to “fill your air” with strife and bile, a character in Spring retorts that “there’s a world out there bigger than Brexit,... Read more... |
Karl Ove Knausgaard: So Much Longing in So Little Space review – smiles more than screams
Sunday, 24 March 2019
Around the works canteen, a dozen huge wall-paintings depict, in bright cheerful colours spread across radically stylised forms, happy scenes of women and men at work and play beside a sunlit sea... Read more... |
David Hepworth: A Fabulous Creation review - how vinyl soothed our souls and defined our being
Sunday, 17 March 2019
Record Store Day is now a fixture on the calendar, a key element in “the vinyl revival”, and this year – 13 April –... Read more... |
Fiona MacCarthy: Walter Gropius review - a master of modernism
Sunday, 10 March 2019
The centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus (literally, “Building House”) art school is on us, prompting publications and exhibitions worldwide. Subtitled “Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus”,... Read more... |
Robert Menasse: The Capital review - much more than just an EU satire
Sunday, 10 March 2019
Forty years ago this July, Simone Veil gave her inaugural speech as first President of the European Parliament. She had many issues to include. Peace came first; as a survivor of Auschwitz and the... Read more... |
Sadie Jones: The Snakes review - lacking feeling
Sunday, 03 March 2019
Bea and Dan are a young married couple. They have a mortgage on their small flat in Holloway and met while out clubbing in Peckham. She’s a plain-looking, modest and hard-working psychotherapist;... Read more... |
George Szirtes: The Photographer at Sixteen review – how grief becomes art
Sunday, 24 February 2019
How long does it take for grief to crystallise into art? No timetable can ever set that date. The poet George Szirtes’s mother took her own life, after previous attempts, during the hot summer of... Read more... |
Sam Bourne: To Kill the Truth review - taut thriller of big ideas
Sunday, 24 February 2019
Great libraries burning, historians murdered: someone somewhere is removing the past by obliterating the ways... Read more... |
Richard J Evans: Eric Hobsbawm - A Life in History review - mesmerisingly readable
Sunday, 17 February 2019
This is an astonishing book: in its breadth, depth and detail and also in its almost palpable, and sometimes unpalatable, admiration of its... Read more... |
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The Book of Clarence review - larky jaunt through biblical e...
The Book of Clarence comes lumbered with the charge of being the new Life of Brian, an irreverent spoof of the life...
Lisa Kaltenegger: Alien Earths review - a whole new world
Our home planet orbits the medium-size star we call the Sun. There are unfathomably many more stars out there. We accepted that these are also...
Bell, Perahia, ASMF Chamber Ensemble, Wigmore Hall review -...
All three works in the second of this week’s Neville Marriner centenary concerts from the ensemble he founded vindicated their intention to reign...
An Actor Convalescing in Devon, Hampstead Theatre review - o...
One can often be made to feel old in the theatre. A hot take in a snappy 90 minutes (with video!) on the latest Gen Z obsession (...
First Persons: composers Colin Alexander and Héloïse Werner...
For tonight’s performance at Milton Court, the nuanced and delicate tones of strings, voices, harmonium and chamber organ will merge...
Album: Paraorchestra with Brett Anderson and Charles Hazlewo...
Death Songbook is, says Charles Hazlewood, founder, artistic director and conductor of Paraorchestra, an album of “music which is about...
Anthracite, Netflix review - murderous mysteries in the Fren...
Ludicrous plotting and a tangled skein of coincidences hold no terrors for the makers of this frequently baffling...
The Comeuppance, Almeida Theatre review - remembering high-s...
I’ve never been one for school reunions, but even if I had kept in touch with former classmates I think that American...