book reviews and features
Sunday Book: George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo
Sunday, 05 March 2017
George Saunders has written a historical novel. Of course, this being Saunders, author of four volumes of... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Yiyun Li - Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life
Sunday, 26 February 2017
Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Jake Arnott - The Fatal Tree
Sunday, 19 February 2017
Novelist Jake Arnott has an eye for seedy glamour. The Fatal Tree takes the 1720s underworld - the setting of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, one of the most successful... Read more... |
'My father Sabahattin Ali is being rediscovered'
Sunday, 19 February 2017
I was 11 years old when my father was killed. A body was found near the border between Turkey and Bulgaria.... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Philip Hook - Rogues' Gallery
Sunday, 12 February 2017
The art dealers of today must be thanking their lucky stars that Philip Hook’s remarkable history of their trade stops where it does. For while it serves as an eminently useful if rather... Read more... |
The private life of Stefan Zweig in England
Thursday, 09 February 2017
On 23 February 1942 at half past four in the afternoon in a secluded Brazilian hilltown called Petrópolis about an hour from Rio, a maid and her husband pushed at the bedroom door of a modest... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Neil Gaiman - Norse Mythology
Sunday, 05 February 2017
Odin the All-Father, “lord of the slain, the gallows god”, has two ravens that “perch on his shoulders and whisper into his ears” as he wanders in disguise around the world. They are Huginn and... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Daniel Levitin - A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics
Sunday, 29 January 2017
Daniel Levitin makes one reference to Donald Trump in this book (to the latter’s claim to have seen on TV... Read more... |
Dr Michael Scott: How to make the most of globalisation
Sunday, 29 January 2017
The Guardian called Brexit “a rejection of globalisation.” That’s as may be, but the reality is we cannot, however much we might want to, check out of the globalised world in which... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Tessa Hadley - Bad Dreams
Sunday, 22 January 2017
In one of Tessa Hadley’s piercingly smart and subtle tales, a woman whose upwardly-mobile path has taken her from Leeds to Philadelphia works for a firm that manufactures instruments to test the “... Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take a subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
The future of Arts Journalism
You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!
We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £49,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d
And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Hamlet Hail to the Thief, RSC, Stratford review - Radiohead...
The safe transfer of power in post-war Western democracies was once a given. The homely Pickfords Removals van outside Number Ten...
Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons, Dulwich Picture Gallery review...
I first came across Rachel Jones in 2021 at the Hayward Gallery’s painting show Mixing it Up: Painting Today. I was blown away by the...
Album: The Young Gods - Appear Disappear
Swiss electro-rockers, Young Gods have been around for 40 years, but this in no way should suggest that they’ve gone soft in their old age. These...
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life review - persuading us that the...
Do the French do irony? Well, was Astérix a Gaul? Obviously they do, and do it pretty well to judge by many of their movies down the...
The King of Pangea, King's Head Theatre review - grief...
There’s an old theatre joke. “The electric chair is too good for a monster like that. They should send him out of town with a new...
Album: Sam Binga - Sam Binga Presents Club Orthodontics
When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which...
Yoshitomo Nara, Hayward Gallery review - sickeningly cute ki...
It’s been a long time since an exhibition made me feel physically sick. The Hayward Gallery is currently hosting a retrospective of the...
Hespèrion XXI, Savall, QEH review - an evening filled with l...
For the first encore of the evening, it was not just the audience but the whole ensemble of Hespèrion XXI that was mesmerised as its leader,...
Album: Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts - Talkin' to...
When Neil Young releases a new album, you can be reasonably sure that you’ll get either a disc of melancholy singer-songwriter fare or a set of...