Book Review: Heretics & Believers
/A big, wonderfully readable new history of the sixteenth-century religious upheaval that transformed English life
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week: Russia Cast Adrift
/Georgy Sviridov was born in the thick of Russia’s metamorphosis, and his idiom in these lieder – narrative, tonal, almost static at times – reflects the stand-off between political upheaval and the impervious cycles of nature.
Read MoreBook Review: The Best Land Under Heaven
/A thorough and searching new book explores not only the tragic fate of the Donner Party but the dreams that motivated them in the first place.
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Ravel and De Falla concertos
/There is a lot of competition for performances of Ravel and De Falla's work for piano and orchestra, but Steven Osborne's new release belongs among the best.
Read MoreThe Phantom of Constancy
/The 1930 novel Rapture, by the Russian avant-garde artist Iliazd, is a fast-paced, darkly funny spin on the adventure genre.
Read MoreThe Most Happy
/As she did with Katherine of Aragon, Alison Weir gives Anne Boleyn the saintly treatment in her new novel. But does Anne, like Katherine, deserve it?
Read MoreGood Grief: In Memory of Denis Johnson
/Denis Johnson died last month, but we have his ten novels and his legacy: the inclination to see the great beauty only afforded by the stripping away of joy.
Read MoreTwo Conversation Poems
/a poem
Read MoreFalling into the Future: An Interview with Paula Bomer
/Steve Danziger interviews Paula Bomer about her new collection of essays, Mysteries and Mortality, and much more besides.
Read MoreAn “Untold” Story?
/Unlike Jean Rhys, Sarah Shoemaker tells Mr. Rochester's side of Jane Eyre with respect and fidelity to Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. But is that the problem?
Read MoreChange Your Direction
/A lively memoir shows there's much more to learning a language than conjugating irregular verbs.
Read MoreTo My Lovers
/a poem
Read MoreDown the Rabbit Hole
/An innovative new book on Lewis Carroll and space avoids spoiling the fun by explaining everything too literally, but still offers new insights on his playful oeuvre.
Read MoreIt’s a Mystery: “What better place than a funeral for a study in human nature”
/June brings a deliciously devious, dark take on vintage English crime fiction, and the return of a charismatic antihero searching for redemption.
Read MoreI Am a Woman’s Life
/George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda nods to Pride and Prejudice then takes us to dark places Austen’s famously “light, and bright, and sparkling” novel would never go.
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Shostakovich's First
/There is nothing wrong with this account of Shostakovich's First Symphony it if you count all the notes and admire the sound. It takes no risks at all, and is only partially redeemed by the inclusion of rare juvenalia.
Read MoreBook Review: Paradise Lost
/The newest biography of the Jazz Age bard tries to get at the man beneath the high-flying legends.
Read MoreNorman Lebrecht's Album of the Week - Kathleen Ferrier remembered
/Listening to these Kathleen Ferrier tracks, newly retrieved from BBC broadcasts and never released before, one is struck over again by the great contralto’s overriding characteristic – her natural, unfettered generosity.
Read MoreBook Review: Ernest Hemingway
/The epic and tortured life of Ernest Hemingway is told with remarkable insight in a powerful new biography
Read MoreBook Review: The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
/An intriguing new book charts the long, complicated, and surprisingly vital JFK memory-industry.
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