Julia Bell on Bluets It’s hard to tell you what Bluets by Maggie Neslon is – it’s not a novel, it’s certainly not a short story either, it’s perhaps creative non-fiction, yes, but it doesn’t conform to the usual narrative tropes – event though there
Joseph Brooker on The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years [Image used under fair dealings provisions] What happens when the biggest band in the world take the stage? You’d think: darkness. Suspense. Appropriate build-up music. The instruments are all on stage, silhouetted
Isabel Davis on why language matters in the USS industrial dispute UCU Rally 2018 [Image (unedited) by Magnus Hagdorn under a CC BY SA 2.0 license] Over the past ten days a lot has changed in the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions dispute that is currently
Isabel Davis on ‘Paradise Regained’, episode 2 of ‘Art, Passion & Power: The Story of the Royal Collection’, presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon. Philippe Mercier, ‘The Music Party’ (1733), Oil on canvas, Royal Collection Trust. This week I caught up on Andrew Graham-Dixon’s series ‘Art, Passion
Joseph Brooker on The Death of Stalin Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin (2017) seemed to me to come out of nowhere, though it’s based on a French comic strip that most of its British viewers will never have heard of before. We knew
Toby Litt on small white monkeys: on self-expression, self-help and shame by Sophie Collins, Book Works, November 2017 Could a book be more timely than this? Sophie Collins’ small white monkeys concerns ‘a traumatic experience, an instance of sexual assault,…’ The Twitter-based hashtag viral movement
Carolyn Burdett on The Work (2017) I’ve been interested in psychoanalysis for a long time. Freudian psychoanalysis, like literature, is committed to words, supremely interested not only in what is said but also in how it gets said. For Freud, the bodily symptom that makes
Joseph Brooker on The Tempest at the Barbican Like many people I think of myself as revering William Shakespeare, and also imagine that I know the outline of his late play The Tempest (c.1611). But a few minutes into the current RSC production at the
Peter Fifield on Oxford, by Martin Parr This exhibition occupies Blackwell Hall, the large foyer of the Bodleian’s Weston Library, which reopened in 2015 after a long and expensive refurbishment. I went here in a lunch break from my research in one of the other,
Professor Martin Paul Eve on The Ferryman Jez Butterworth’s previous play, Jerusalem, starring the irrepressible Mark Rylance, was a stage hit. After its gestation at the Royal Court, Jerusalem transferred to the West End and then to Broadway in the US, despite its main theme being