book reviews and features
Jacqueline Rose: The Plague review - tracing our response to tragedy
Saturday, 17 June 2023
In The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, Jacqueline Rose makes a surprising pivot from her usual topics – Sylvia Plath, children’s fiction, Zionism, to name a few – to throw a spotlight... Read more... |
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Small Worlds review - Ghana and London dance together
Wednesday, 14 June 2023
Small Worlds, the second novel from Caleb Azumah Nelson, is a delight: a book with a real feeling for sound and dance, and a sense of place from London to Ghana and back again. It’s a... Read more... |
Andrey Kurkov: Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv review - a city speaks its multitudes
Saturday, 10 June 2023
Rock music helped to subvert the Soviet Union by glamorising youthful rebellion and the West. In the opening scene of Andrey Kurkov’s... Read more... |
Helen Czerski: Blue Machine review - how the ocean works
Tuesday, 06 June 2023
If you cannot even step into the same river twice, how to take the measure of the ocean? Dipping your toes at the beach is irresistible, but uninformative. Sampling stuff out at sea helps more,... Read more... |
Polly Toynbee: An Uneasy Inheritance - My Family and Other Radicals review - looking back
Monday, 05 June 2023
There are few contemporary journalists whose names are instantly familiar – and usually it’s for the wrong... Read more... |
Sophia Giovannitti: Working Girl - On Selling Art and Selling Sex review - portrait of the artist as sex worker
Wednesday, 31 May 2023
Sophia Giovannitti begins selling sex because it promises to make her the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. She also has a “near categorical hatred of work.” I nearly –... Read more... |
Kieran Yates: All the Houses I've Ever Lived In, Brighton Festival 2023 review - home as comfort, and cruelty
Sunday, 28 May 2023
The audience questions are when Kieran Yates’ talk boils over. Her book All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In considers housing policy through autobiography and imaginative research, and the preceding... Read more... |
Matthew Shindell: For the Love of Mars: A Human History of the Red Planet review - a world of possibility
Friday, 19 May 2023
Humans are unsettled by incomplete data, unanswered questions. Show us dots on paper, and we’ll join them to make a picture. Show us objects in the night sky, and we create worlds. So it has... Read more... |
Susan Finlay: The Lives of the Artists review - the knotted threads of memoir and art
Wednesday, 17 May 2023
Benvenuto Cellini’s My Life (1728) is not the artist-biography to which Susan Finlay’s The Lives of the Artists pays its most obvious homage, but it appears to have followed its... Read more... |
Glory to Sound: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Brighton Festival 2023 review - a reggae rebel's life in music
Monday, 15 May 2023
Straight-backed at 70, Linton Kwesi Johnson wears the smart garb of a British Caribbean elder – trilby, cream jacket, West Indies maroon jumper and tie, grey trousers, blue socks and grey shoes.... 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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The Last Musician of Auschwitz review - a haunting testament...
“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring...
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Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - premiere...
Huw Watkins’ Concerto for Orchestra, the fourth new work of his to be commissioned and premiered by the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder, is...