Reviews

Andrew McMillan’s debut collection Physical opens with an epitaph taken from one of the often overlooked novels of Hilda Doolittle, better known as H.D.,...

Many writers have played tennis: Nabokov, Frost, Pound, Hemingway, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, even Solzhenitsyn in Vermont and Martin Amis today. Like poetry, tennis has strict rules and requires technical skill. It is individual yet social, aesthetically pleasing, intellectual, at times erotic. Despite its formal rituals [...]

In two exhibitions by Jenny Holzer and Nan Goldin currently on display at the Tate Modern we are presented by two collections of socially...

Adam Scovell’s debut novel is narrated by Thomas, a young man who hallucinates the memories of his deceased mentor, Phyllis Ewans. Phyllis is a...

Intimacy and infidelity, warmth and vacuousness, possessed and free. These are all the paradoxes that are found, lost, and found again in Tiphanie Yanique’s...

I first saw the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Company during a visit to New York between Christmas and New Year in the mid-90s. I was entranced by the troupe and have never since missed a chance [...]

It’s a familiar, yet uncanny feeling we all know; like waking up in a hotel you’re sure you’ve never stayed in before, and yet,...

In every first-person narrative readers are ultimately trapped in the mind of the protagonist, doomed only to know what they know. In Patience, author Toby Litt takes this concept further by sharing the story of Elliott, who is himself trapped in his mind, as his disability inhibits most of his physical movement [...]

Briony Willis WITCH WITCH, by Rebecca Tamás, Penned in the Margins, pp. 119, £9.99. (paperback) In her latest collection, WITCH, Rebecca Tamás explores the triumphs and oppression, the...

  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...

It’s a strange time in the history of the visual arts avant-garde right now. So strange that the vast majority of those who think...

On the night of its seventeenth performance, Woolf Works opens with sounds of London; Big Ben, the distant rumbling of cars, all of which...

Ocean Vuong and Kayo Chingonyi’s recent reading is one of the most spectacular that I have attended. R. A. Villanueva introduced the event by...

An unmitigated treat if you love conceptual art installations and sculptures, SPACE SHIFTERS features twenty artists exploring our perception of space and 'optical' minimalism. Spanning...

This autumn, Archipelago Books published two short story collections in translation: A. Ambai’s A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, translated by the late Lakshmi Holmström, and Hebe Uhart’s The Scent of Buenos Aires, translated by Maureen Shaughnessy. Ambai’s and Uhart’s collections reveal each author’s range as a storyteller [...]

Ghosts, currently playing at Rose Theatre Kingston brings Stephen Unwin’s (who is also the creative director of this play) translation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1800s...

When Frank Auerbach first came to public notice – emerged rather than burst – in the 1950s he was noted as a “British Expressionist”...

“You can take an empty space and call it a bare stage”, Amber Massie-Blomfield opens her book with this evocative statement and thus begins...

Over her three-decade long career, Icelandic artist Björk has always blurred limits; genre limits between experimental and pop music, verbal limits between language and...

A good bookshop can be many different things - a haven from the world, a counter-cultural space, and a meeting point for friends, as...

Princess Ida, Finborough Theatre, Until 18th April 2015 One’s first experience of seeing a play at Finborough theatre is really rather charming. Located above the Finborough Arms...

In The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquére  Roseanne Stone discusses how our consciousness is altered by...

Hannah Lowe’s latest collection of poetry Chan (Bloodaxe, 2016) revisits the characters and stories from her first collection, Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013), which won the...

For fans of Ian McEwan’s writing, 2019 presented two rough-cut diamonds: Machines Like Me and The Cockroach. Not without their flaws, as some critics noted, they are nonetheless highly enjoyable and sure to leave even the ultra-demanding and fastidious reader hankering for more. The novels differ in more ways than one. Firstly, there’s size: Machines Like Me clocks in at a reasonable 306 pages, while The Cockroach, a much slimmer work [...]