biography
Dave Eggers: The Monk of Mokha review - how to become a grand master of coffeeSunday, 28 January 2018
A macchiato may never taste the same again. If you’ve ever wondered about the politics and history behind your cup of designer coffee, The Monk of Mokha will answer all your questions, and more.This is the prolific Dave Eggers’s third semi-... Read more... |
Jenny Uglow: Mr Lear - A Life of Art and Nonsense review - a lonely Victorian life, so richly illustratedSunday, 17 December 2017
Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear (1812-1888) is a meander, almost day by day, through the long and immensely energetic life of a polymath artist. She builds her narrative on an enormous plethora of primary sources – his marvellous illustrated... Read more... |
Everybody's Talking About Jamie, Apollo Theatre review - inclusive and utterly joyfulThursday, 23 November 2017
Everybody’s been talking about Everybody’s Talking About Jamie since its Sheffield Crucible debut earlier this year. It’s unusual to see a musical come steaming into the West End based on word on mouth – not star casting, or association with an... Read more... |
Han Kang: The White Book review - between what is, what was, what might have beenSunday, 05 November 2017
A woman gives birth alone two months early in a frost-bound village in the Korean countryside. In Poland, a solitary woman washes down white migraine pills and concludes she must write. The child that is born dies. The finished book commemorates her... Read more... |
Claire Tomalin: A Life of My Own review - the biographer on herselfSunday, 24 September 2017
The title says it all, or at least quite a lot. Luminously intelligent, an exceptionally hard worker, bilingual in French, a gifted biographer, Claire Tomalin has been at the heart of the literati glitterati all her working life. Here she turns her... Read more... |
Prism, Hampstead Theatre review - a life through the lensFriday, 15 September 2017
Jack Cardiff was one of the all-time greats of cinematography, the man who shot such Powell and Pressburger classics as The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death, worked on John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine... Read more... |
James Hamilton: Gainsborough - A Portrait review - an artistic life told with verve and enthusiasmSunday, 06 August 2017
James Hamilton’s wholly absorbing biography is very different from the usual kind of art historical study that often surrounds such a major figure as Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Hamilton is positively in love with his subject, and writes with... Read more... |
It's So Easy and Other Lies, Sky Arts review - uneven rock bio outstays its welcomeSaturday, 22 July 2017
Duff McKagan is a survivor. He’s a bass player too, from the fledgling Seattle punk/proto-grunge outfit 10 Minute Warning to the stadium-filling behemoth of Guns N’ Roses, but if you were judging by the narrative weight of this 2015 documentary, you... Read more... |
Brenda Maddox: Reading the Rocks review - revelations of geologySunday, 25 June 2017
Reading the Rocks has a provocative subtitle, “How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life”, indicating the role of geology in paving the way to an understanding of the evolution of our planet as a changing physical entity that was to... Read more... |
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger review - voyages round a giantTuesday, 20 June 2017
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.” I’ve quoted these words by John Berger many, many... Read more... |
Sunday Book: Yiyun Li - Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your LifeSunday, 26 February 2017
Yiyun Li’s fiction comes garlanded in praise from authors and journals that don’t ladle it out carelessly, so it feels almost churlish to cavil over a memoir written during the course of two years while the author battled serious mental health... Read more... |
To Walk Invisible, BBC OneFriday, 30 December 2016
Yorkshire-born screenwriter Sally Wainwright has carved a distinguished niche for herself as chronicler of that brooding, beautiful region’s social and familial dramas. After the romance of Last Tango in Halifax and the gritty panorama of Happy... Read more... |
