Reviews on The Review

Homes Away From Home

at Manchester Literature Festival Event: David Constantine & Pawel Huelle, 8th October, 6:00pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation

To the mild stupefaction of the staff in the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, I arrive to this—the second event of the first day of the Manchester Literature Festival, and, incidentally, the first event of [...]

The description of Richard Bean’s The Heretic as a ‘hilarious comedy’ rings true in The Library Theatre’s current production. Eccentric characters, clever scripting and an original angle all contribute to the success of the play, which received much audience appreciation throughout. Telling the story of Dr Diane Cassell, the black sheep of the science department [...]

Paul Mills, Voting for Spring (Smith/Doorstop, £9.95) and You Should’ve Seen Us, (Smith/Doorstop, £6.95)

Paul Mills, at a reading in York in the late 1990s, was the first writer I ever heard to suggest that the next major movement in poetry and also literary theory would have ‘something to do with the environment. It’s inevitable’. In [...]

The Country Wife – Royal Exchange, Manchester
Naya Tsentourou

It’s not often that Restoration comedy arrives in Manchester. When it does, however, the genre’s poignant social critique, its unconventional values, and its celebration of playhouses find in the city’s culture a perfect fit. Polly Findlay’s production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, first performed in 1675 [...]

Parks is not afraid of the definite article; not only in the titles of his books, which also includes The Cage but also with the titles of the poems: ‘The Northern Lights’, ‘The Girl in the Garden’, ‘The March’. He also has poems entitled ‘Miners’, ‘Eclipse’ and ‘Standards’. The use of the definite article establishes, [...]

A couple of years ago, I took my son up to Hull University. It was an open day for potential Chemistry students, but in the middle of the opening presentation, the tutor showed a slide of ‘Hull’s Three Poets’. The slide was the famous picture of of Larkin, Andrew Motion and Douglas Dunn outside the [...]

The quarrel isn’t often with the poems, though it can be; the quarrel often seems to be with Fenton as a purveyor of his own extravagant gifts as a poet. Because Fenton is always likely to be excising parts of his canon in ways that can seem supremely irritating to his many deep admirers. [...]

It would be too easy to point to the Evan Jones’ autobiography to find the dynamic for this book: a Canadian-Greek, resident in Manchester, married to a German. What would be more natural than for Jones to look at the world askew? And to view it from the various kinds of transport that take [...]

John Matthias is a kind of mid-Atlantic national treasure; he was born in Ohio, but married a woman from Hacheston, Suffolk and has spent most of his life shuttling between the two areas. And his status is such that celebratory volumes of essays have been published on him in both the UK and USA. But [...]

Miró: Sculptor, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Free Entry, Runs Until 06.01.13

It’s Monday of the long Jubilee weekend and I have decided to spend the best part of the day exploring the Miró exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park amongst its well trimmed grounds and lush, cloud shadowed fields and parkland where ruptured tree trunks lie horizontally and [...]