Review | Orient London – A sizzle above the rest
Steven O'Brien
Orient London - A sizzle above the rest
We were off to see the vast brocade of the Wallace Collection. However, lunchtime found us...
Review | The Governesses by Anne Serre, tr. by Mark Hutchinson
In a large country house enclosed by a gold-gated garden, three young governesses are responsible for the education and general well-being of a group...
Review | WITCH by Rebecca Tamás
In her latest collection, WITCH, Rebecca Tamás explores the triumphs and oppression, the strengths and weaknesses, the power and the fears that generations of...
Dido and Aeneas by Jeffrey Meyers
Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse, Andrea di Robilant,
Atlantic Books, 348 pp. £17.99 (hardback).
Andrea di Robilant has done extensive research, but...
Review | The Snowman at The Peacock Theatre
This Christmas, join the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in their magical rendition of Raymond Brigg’s The Snowman.
Christmas would not be the same without this enchanting...
Review | Summer and Smoke at The Duke of York’s Theatre
A poetic vision of human nature and our existential struggle to forge the middle ground between body and soul. After writing his (in)famous A...
Review | Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde at The...
The centrifugal drive behind much of the work featured in the Barbican’s new exhibition Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde is enunciated by Rodin in the first gallery: ‘I express in a loud voice what all artists think. Desire! Desire! What a formidable stimulant.’
Interview | Cradeaux Alexander
American video and performance artist Cradeaux Alexander presents a mid-career retrospective this month at Bow Arts, London. Jemima Walter met him to uncover how...
Event Preview | Face Value by The Lot 5 Collective
CRAFT ISN’T A DIRTY WORD
The art world has been divided since the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one side, the rejection of...
Review | Promising Young Women by Caroline O’Donoghue
This year has truly brought to the fiction scene some of the most stunning and powerful female characters. From the extreme – such as My...
Charles Dibdin – Christmas Gambols
Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) has a strong claim to be Britain’s first pop star. He became famous as a performer in the 1760s, then went...
The Threepenny Opera
If you put on a production of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, how much does anyone care that the action is ostensibly set in...
The Red and Yellow Nothing by Jay Bernard
It is difficult to put a finger on the immediate aftermath of reading The Red and Yellow Nothing: there is puzzlement, rage, and wonder,...
A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk
I was reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow in London recently, when a Scottish man stopped me to say how much he’d enjoyed it – ‘best book ever’, he...
The Lobster
If you were to be turned into an animal what animal would you choose? This question remains at the forefront of Yorgos Lanthimos’s first...
Macbeth
Scotland herself is the main character in this blood-soaked reimagining of Shakespeare's shortest tragedy. So enamoured is director Justin Kurzel of his Highland landscape...
Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots
Upon viewing Jackson Pollock’s 1951 solo show in which he debuted his now famed ‘black paintings’, friend and fellow painter Alfonso Ossorio commented that...
40 Sonnets by Don Paterson
Paterson is at his best when writing about heartbreak. “The Six,” this reviewer’s favourite piece in 40 Sonnets, speaks of a guitar picked up...
The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
In 2009, Ursula K. Le Guin caused something of a stir in the science-fiction community by contradicting Atwood’s claim that her novels belonged to...
The New World by Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz
The New World
Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz
Granta, £12.99 (paperback)
The New World opens grippingly by immersing the reader in the consciousness of Jane, a...
Iain Sinclair and Will Self on Walking London
I’ve got a new eternal certainty to file alongside death and taxes: if you walk around London enough, and you know what he looks...
Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick DeWitt
'Cheerily, then, as one making teatime conversation, she asked “do you yourself ever think of suicide?” Lucy pondered this. “No more than is customary,...
The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
The Heart Goes Last
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, £18.99
Reworked from an e-serial, Atwood’s latest novel is as captivating and humorous as her previous work. The America inhabited...
Purity by Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen likes big books. Each one of his critically acclaimed works are weighty door-stoppers but their tangible size in no way matches the...