Reviews

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...

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.’

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...

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...

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 (1745-1814) has a strong claim to be Britain’s first pop star. He became famous as a performer in the 1760s, then went...

If you put on a production of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, how much does anyone care that the action is ostensibly set in...

It is difficult to put a finger on the immediate aftermath of reading The Red and Yellow Nothing: there is puzzlement, rage, and wonder,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

  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...

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 Chris Adrian & Eli Horowitz Granta, £12.99 (paperback) The New World opens grippingly by immersing the reader in the consciousness of Jane, a...

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...

'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 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...

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...

‘"We need," she said, as I arranged myself in the chair across from her large wooden desk, "to talk about Jerry."’ Who’s Jerry? The...

McQueen Theatre Royal Haymarket Limited run from 19th August Reviewed by Lauren Hepburn It's been five years since Lee McQueen took his life. The exquisite dress worn by...

Unfinished…Works from The Courtauld Gallery Summer Showcase Special Display 18th June-20th September 2015 Unfinished masterpieces tend only to come to light upon the artist’s death,...

On the 25th June The Serpentine Pavilion unveiled its much-anticipated 15th annual commission, this time appointed to young Spanish architects José Selgas...

In Where My Heart Used to Beat, we witness the transformation of protagonist Robert Hendricks’s ideas on memory and its place within the present....