Christine Jones David Hockney’s ‘The Arrival of Spring’ at the Royal Academy of Arts David Hockney is considered one of…

Ria Higgins Spanish Modern Landscapes at Colnaghi Many of us long for the darkness of the last year to pass…

Carers are the unacknowledged stevedores of the world. The economic contribution of their unpaid humping and dumping is estimated at $10 trillion per year: 13 per cent of global GDP. In the UK, where 6,000 people become carers every day, they save the government £132 billion a year by their labour. Yet, as Sam Mills argues in her memoir The Fragments of My Father, carers  are invariably overlooked and undervalued. The ‘Clap for Carers’ in the early months of the pandemic implied caring was a one-off act: a singular performance with a triumphant crescendo and a definite end. Instead, as Mills makes clear, care is work: frequently exhausting, often dull […]

Poet Robin Robertson, whose original tales summon the violent beauty of the Scottish landscape, dedicates his latest collection to ‘the taken: for all those feart of the glamour’, as Grimoire is a collection of the shadow self, for and about those who dwell on peripheries. In a collaboration that calls to mind the Brothers Grimm, the poet’s brother, Tim Robertson, has rendered illustrations that appear on the page like an inkblot test, dark mirrors lending space […]

Before the Great War a brilliant group of Jewish artists were drawn to Paris. Amedeo Modigliani (called Modi) was born in Italy; Moise Kisling, Jules Pascin, Jacques Lipschitz, Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall and Sonia Delaunay came from Eastern Europe. The Jewish painter and poet Max Jacob (1876-1944), born in Quimper, Brittany, was the only Frenchman connected to this group […]

Karl R De Mesa’s collection. despite belonging to a very different genre, reminded me of John Wayne’s classic Western movie True Grit (1969). It places conceptions of mettle, both physical and emotional, under a high-intensity microscope. In examining the nuances of grit, violence and determination, the Filipino author and reporter digs deep beneath the lazy, surface-level musings of an all too modern journalism. His profiles of mixed martial artists (MMA) such as […]

Liza M. Wiemer’s novel, The Assignment, is a frighteningly realistic portrayal of modern antisemitism in a small-town community that blurs the lines between past and present, fiction and reality. The novel is a fictionalised account of a real assignment that is given to students, which instructs them to debate the Final Solution, the Nazi’s plan for genocide of the Jewish people. When students Logan March and Cade Crawford protest holding the debate […]

On 4 August 1944, as the Nazi occupation of Italy was coming to an end, the German forces evacuating Florence unleashed a final barrage of destruction, deploying mines across the city to bring down all but one of the historic bridges which had lined the River Arno for centuries. The blasts brought down many of the houses on each side of the river, including the house of writers Anna Banti and Roberto Longhi. Buried among the rubble of the house was the near-completed […]

Hag is an anthology of stories responding to classic folk tales from the British Isles, penned by some of the most exciting women writing in Britain and Ireland today. Originally conceived as an Audible podcast, the book version from Virago Press also has two new stories as well as copies of the original tales on which they are based. Daisy Johnson starts Hag off with a story that poses the question at the heart of any retelling: Is it mine to tell? […]

‘We all secretly see ourselves as outsiders in one way or another.’ This, argues Alice Slater, editor of new anthology Outsiders from 3 Of Cups Press, is why readers are attracted to characters who do not fit in. But the very fact that the experience is universal exposes the paradox of the ‘outsider’ label. If we are all outsiders, then none of us are. The outsider then must mean something different to different people. Often, an outcast narrator, as Slater says, can be a representative for […]

Sue Harper’s new collection of warped, modern fairy tales, The Dark Nest, updates classic characters – from European folklore to Wonder Woman – for a contemporary audience interested in the macabre and the taboo. The book is twisted but amusing: a journey into the quirks of fear and human desire. Kafkaesque transformation, of people and the worlds they inhabit, is a recurring theme in Harper’s work. Instead of men waking up from long slumbers to find they have turned into insects, the living mortify and the dead begin to dance. In the story ‘Graisaille’, the narrator is  ‘frozen and immobile’ like a corpse, while the dead rise up in  ‘an ecstasy […]

A grungy rock musical about the Brontës and their challenging lives, battling against addiction, disease and poverty, promises to be an exhilarating take on this famous family. Bleak, poverty-stricken Yorkshire becomes a stark, wooden platform that stages a series of powerful rock ballads. With music by Christopher Ash and book and lyrics by Carl Miller, Wasted’s undeniably talented cast have the potential to create something really exciting, but sadly, the production’s […]

This stunning Old Vic production, devised from the best-selling YA novel by Patrick Ness, hits so many emotional notes; it left me in bits. In its honest depiction of illness and grief, A Monster Calls is a timely production to stream. Conor, while coming to terms with his mum’s cancer, must struggle with school bullies, falling out with his best friend, and his dad moving to America with his new family. It is a lot to tackle in under two hours, but the play is well-paced and […]

Andrés Barba’s ghostly novella Such Small Hands met with resounding critical success in its native Spain, as well as in the UK and US with English translations by Lisa Dillman, in 2017. Darkly compelling, it was lauded for its unsettling plot and baroque descriptions, blending conventions from Greek tragedy and Gothic literature […]

No sooner than I started reading Wing, Matthew Francis’s latest collection of nature poems, did I want to read it out loud to the nearest person who would listen. ‘Longhouse Autumn’, the first, is a pungent broth of imagery, stuffed with suety metaphors: a remote Welsh beach is covered with ‘pick-and-mix shingle’, stippled with the ‘semolina and jam’ of pigeon droppings, concealing a ‘leathery mummified dogfish.’ […]

For contemporary fiction to stay pertinent in the twenty-first century, it must continue to do what great novelists have always striven to do: challenge, interpret, and risk offence. Michael Arditti’s new novel The Anointed challenges the ultimate orthodoxy, the Bible – in particular, the ancient tales of the Old Testament, which have endured for thousands of years, despite their capriciousness and morals archaic to the modern reader […]

At first glance, Zonal looks like a change of direction for Don Paterson. He made his name as a colloquial formalist, someone who could make rhyme and metre feel like the natural way of writing poetry in English. In this book, the carefully managed forms that dominated his work till now have been replaced by a longer, looser and less metrical line. […]

Sean Bonney died in Berlin last November at the age of fifty, a couple of months after the publication of Our Death. The collection is a follow-up to his well-received Letters against the Firmament, described by Bonney, in an interview with BOMB magazine, as ‘open letters to the poetry community about the political situation in Britain’. Our Death expands on these epistolary poems: loose translations of the Greek poet Katerina Gogou appear alongside other revelatory material in both prose and verse form. The tone is bleak, drenched in premonitions of death, yet utterly gripping. […]