tue 09/09/2025

book reviews and features

Ben Okri, Brighton Festival 2019 review - adventures in writing

Katie Colombus

If there’s one thing to learn from Ben Okri in this evening of conversation at Brighton Festival...

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Leah Hazard: Hard Pushed review - a midwife's tales

Marina Vaizey

This layered medical memoir by practicing midwife Leah Hazard unpacks riveting tales of all kinds of deliveries and is...

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Clare Carlisle: Philosopher of the Heart review – how to be human

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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Banine: Days in the Caucasus review - revolutions, pogroms and love

Katherine Waters

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...

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Frans de Waal: Mama's Last Hug review - animal feelings

Marina Vaizey

Primatologist, ethologist, zoologist, biologist, social psychologist, behaviourist – how may ‘ists’ can one person have? Dutch-American...

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My Enemy's Cherry Tree: Wang Ting-Kuo review - a masterpiece from Taiwan

Katherine Waters

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...

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Ali Smith: Spring review – green shoots, dark fears

Boyd Tonkin

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,...

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Karl Ove Knausgaard: So Much Longing in So Little Space review – smiles more than screams

Boyd Tonkin

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...

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David Hepworth: A Fabulous Creation review - how vinyl soothed our souls and defined our being

Liz Thomson

Record Store Day is now a fixture on the calendar, a key element in “the vinyl revival”, and this year – 13 April –...

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Fiona MacCarthy: Walter Gropius review - a master of modernism

Marina Vaizey

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”,...

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