sat 24/05/2025

book reviews and features

'What did you do?' Actors reveal their Shakespearean secrets

Julian Curry

Much of the brilliance of Shakespeare lies in the openness, or ambiguity, of his texts. Whereas a novelist will often describe a character, an action or a scene in the most minute detail,...

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Sunday Book: Jo Nesbo - The Thirst

Jasper Rees

The jacket designs of Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole thrillers don’t muck about. The novelist’s name with its...

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Michelangelo's Madonna and Child

Alison Cole

Michelangelo's Taddei tondo, which depicts the Madonna and Child with the Infant St John in a rocky landscape, is the only Michelangelo marble in Britain. Currently one of the stars of the...

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Sunday Book: Jean Hanff Korelitz - The Devil and Webster

Matthew Wright

Naomi Roth, president of Webster College, Massachusetts, has come a long way since readers first made her acquaintance in Korelitz’s second...

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Brighton Festival 2017: 12 Free Events

Thomas H Green

The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer,...

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Sunday Book: Min Kym - Gone: A Girl, a Violin, a Life Unstrung

Adam Sweeting

“What’s it like to be a child prodigy?” is a question asked by violinist Min Kym several times...

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Sunday Book: Christian Madsbjerg - Sensemaking

Peter Forbes

Two pernicious practices dominate Christian Madsbjerg's Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm: algorithm addiction and fake philosophy. The author thinks...

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Sunday Book: Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Legacy

David Nice

Anyone who's followed Yrsa's earlier novels, many of them featuring down-to-earth attorney Thora...

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Sunday Book: Helen Dunmore - Birdcage Walk

Boyd Tonkin

Birdcage Walk in Bristol really exists. It runs under an arched canopy of branches though a long-disused graveyard in Clifton. At this eerie spot, all that remains of the blitzed church of St...

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Sunday Book: George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo

Markie Robson-Scott

George Saunders has written a historical novel. Of course, this being Saunders, author of four volumes of...

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It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Faust, Royal Opera review - pure theatre in this solid reviv...

“Satan come to me!” The Devil doesn’t so much appear in David McVicar’s Faust as reveal himself to have always been there. We discover...

Mrs. Warren's Profession, Garrick Theatre review - moth...

How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893...

Mongrel review - deeply empathetic filmmaking from Taiwan

There is a dark, spectral quality to this compassionate film about Southeast Asian migrant workers in rural Taiwan. At the centre...

Owen, Manchester Camerata, Takács-Nagy, Stoller Hall, Manche...

Manchester Camerata spent eight years performing and recording a complete edition of Mozart’s piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist...

Album: Morcheeba - Escape the Chaos

Morcheeba reach their 30th anniversary this year. The 1990s...

The Phoenician Scheme review - further adventures in the idi...

It’s not what he says, it’s the way he says it. Few filmmakers have bent the term “auteur” to their own ends more boldly than...

Album: Ammar 808 - Club Tounsi

Ammar 808 is the high octane vehicle for the Tunisian-born producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, now based in Denmark. His first album Maghreb United...

Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning review - can this...

Whether it is or isn’t the final Mission: Impossible film, there’s a distinct fin-de-siècle feel about this eighth instalment, and not...

Code of Silence, ITVX review - inventively presented reality...

In the guided tour of Britain’s cathedral cities that is the primetime TV...

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