Reviews

September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem, Ian Sansom, Harper Collins Publishers, 2019, 352 pp, £16.99 (hardback) W.H. Auden’s image in the popular imagination...

Exposure, Olivia Sudjic, Pensinsula Press, 2018, pp. 127, £6 Exposure, the new book by Olivia Sudjic, elegantly dissects the multi-layered web of anxieties particular to...

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...

Review | Nowhere Nearer by Alice Miller By Jack Solloway ‘We are no longer quite here and not yet there at all’, writes Anna Freud in...

In the increasingly urbanised world in which we live, as encapsulated by 'The Commute', the first poem in Sarah Corbett's latest collection, A Perfect...

The building itself is an intricate dance of angles, edges and corners; the colours and lines are a call to life, an open invitation...

If you were wondering where all the bees had gone, look no further than Jessica Albarn’s remarkable exhibition Resurrection, which is showing at the...

‘Without anxiety and sickness I would have been a rudderless ship…’ – E. Munch At any given time of the year, somewhere on the continent, there...

At risk of pointing out the obvious, it should be said before anything else, that J. M. W. Turner was always popular. Turner had...

Stephen B Whatley’s work is featured on our August/September front cover and on Thursday I went to his private preview entitled ‘Paintings From Prayer’...

  The BFI London Film Festival is the UK’s largest and most star-studded film event. This year’s line-up includes 240 films from over 70 countries....

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman By Charles Williams Biteback Publishing, £25 In the age of the internet it is easy to forget the immense influence that...

Notes from the Dream House encloses half a century of films reviewed for the Observer by legendary critic Philip French. The book is a compact reminder of French’s immense knowledge of film and the cinematic world, spanning from 1963 to 2013, almost half the history of film, throughout which French's ability to convey dense ideas in a short and easily digestible format shines through, whether the high-brow or low-brow is being reviewed.

Scottish music in 1983 This is Memorial Device, David Keenan, Faber and Faber, February 2017, pp.304, £14.99, (paperback) News of the death, back in June, of Bogdan...

'The whole challenge of poetry', Alice Oswald once wrote, 'is to keep language open, so that what we don't yet know can pass through...

Virginia Woolf viewed greatness as a “positive possession”. In her mind greatness was “a bodily presence; it has nothing to do with anything said....

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is about to turn one hundred years old, and he still has plenty to say. In his work Little Boy – a sort...

“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...

Vivian, Christina Hesselholdt, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019, pp.192, £12.99 (paperback) “What I produce is so good that if I start showing it to professionals, I’ll never...

Katy Brand’s Three Women at the Trafalgar Studios offers a representation of the title across respective and somewhat stereotypical generations.  Suzanne, a crystal-loving 40-year old played by...

‘He’s back in the ghost house where he, himself, is the ghost.’ (‘Broken’) ‘sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines as if threading nets in...

In her latest collection, WITCH, Rebecca Tamás explores the triumphs and oppression, the strengths and weaknesses, the power and the fears that generations of...

Lyndsey Turner’s revival of Brian Friel’s 1979 play uses the wisdom of age to give this oft dubbed “modern masterpiece” a dark depth, comedy,...

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