book reviews and features
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... |
Robert Harris: Munich review - reselling Hitler
Saturday, 16 September 2017
Robert Harris’s first book about Hitler told the story of the hoax diaries which seduced Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Trevor-Roper. After Selling Hitler (1986) came Fatherland (1992... 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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