tragedy
Refugee lives: The Singularity, by Balsam Karam, reviewed
The stories of two tragic mothers are interwoven in a haunting novel revolving around war, displacement, despair and the loss of children
The hubris of the great airship designers
Rushing to build the world’s largest flying machine was perhaps Britain’s greatest imperial folly, with a disregard for safety measures dooming the R101 to disaster
The twists keep coming
Murray’s immersive, beautifully written mega-tome about a family in a small town in Ireland is as funny as it is deeply disturbing
The secret life of Thomas Mann: The Magician, by Colm Tóibín, reviewed
In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…
Do Greek plays really need a ‘modern twist’?
Rufus Norris, the National Theatre’s artistic director, has revealed that all those tedious ancient plays will from now on be…
Putting the boot into Italy
A young woman, naked and covered in blood, totters numbly down a night road. A driver spots her in his…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
Kathleen Kennedy kicks over the traces
Kathleen Kennedy and her elder brother JFK were the grandchildren of upwardly mobile Irish Catholic immigrants. John F. Fitzgerald, ‘Honey…
Sarah Kane's Cleansed is a thin, vicious pantomime
Big fuss about Cleansed at the Dorfman. Talk of nauseous punters rushing for the gangways may have perversely delighted the…
The perfect big bang that opens this book was too good to be true
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would…
