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Familial Fault Lines – A review of Christmas Day by Sam Grabiner
Artwork by Marous Christmas Day, the sophomore play of writer Sam Grabiner, finished its month long run at the Almeida Theatre in London earlier this year. For just under two hours (with no interval) we watch a family meet for a meal on Christmas Day. However, as Tamara (Bel Powley) is keen to assert, this…
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Sirāt (2025) at the Cambridge Film Festival
Artwork by Antonio De Lorenzi The central thread running through Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt (2025) is absence. Winner of the 2025 Jury Prize in Cannes and nominated for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Oscars, the film follows Luis (Sergi López), accompanied by his son, Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona), as he searches for his daughter…
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Visible Feeling After Wicked
Artwork by Zoe James-Williams You would be forgiven for assuming that Wicked (2024) and its sequel the following year were particularly emotional films. They certainly have their weep-worthy moments: see the crescendo of Defying Gravity, or the final goodbye shared between Elphaba and Glinda. Yet, despite these scenes — and numerous others that drew tears…
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Hurvin Anderson at Tate Britain
Shear Cut, 2024. (c) Hurvin Anderson. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Richard Ivey Hurvin Anderson’s (b.1965) first major solo show at Tate Britain opens with a series of works based on the artist’s memory of friends on Handsworth Common in Birmingham. In Ball Watching (1997) the paint is layered and scraped to…
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To Be Seen: Catherine Opie at the National Portrait Gallery
Oliver in a Tutu by Catherine Opie. 2004 © Catherine Opie. Courtesy: Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul; Thomas Dane Gallery The National Portrait Gallery’s latest exhibition, To Be Seen, covers the work of renowned, queer American photographer Catherine Opie. Through a masterfully curated exploration of identity in all…
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Cecily Brown: Picture Making
Image: Cecily Brown: Picture Making, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. © Cecily Brown. Photo: © Jo Underhill Cecily Brown’s new exhibition at Serpentine South, her first UK solo exhibition for over twenty years, represents a ‘homecoming’ for the British-born, New-York based artist. As well as a selection of key paintings dating back to 2001, Brown…
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The Long Now: The Saatchi Gallery at 40
Installation view of The Long Now: Saatchi Gallery at 40 (2026). Photography by Matt Chung. Courtesy of Saatchi Gallery, London. Last year, the Saatchi Gallery turned 40. To mark its anniversary, the gallery’s latest exhibition, The Long Now, consists of a selection of historic pieces shown alongside new work by contemporary artists. Paintings, sculptures, videos…
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The Problem with Pynchon
Artwork by Felipe de Silva (2026) “Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney…perhaps not,” reads the epigraph of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Shadow Ticket. Taken from the 1934 horror film The Black Cat, the quote speaks to the peculiarity of Pynchon’s style, which tends to tread the line between the metaphysical and the absurd. His novels are philosophical, yet…
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Amelia Barratt at CORPUS Gallery
Installation view of Marina, by Amelia Barratt. Courtesy of the artist and CORPUS, Cambridge. Photography: Stephen James Amelia Barratt’s ‘Marina’ is the fourth exhibition to take place in CORPUS gallery in Cambridge, a white cube space for contemporary art on King’s Street which opened last year. Barratt (b.1989) is a Glasgow-based artist who works across painting,…
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Wish You Were Here 50
Artwork by Anthony Galati Syd Barrett was only a member of Pink Floyd for about three years of the band’s nearly thirty-year existence. Despite initially serving as their primary songwriter and vocalist, his behaviour began to change as Pink Floyd’s profile began to ascend, often attributed to his use of LSD and other drugs. Even…
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All Penetration, No Foreplay: Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”
Artwork by Tijana Moraca (2023) A set of double marks, signed with hands raised and fingers twitching; “Wuthering Heights”, spoken with derision. This is how I’ve been introducing Emerald Fennell’s latest film to friends. My use of air quotes is not only a poor attempt at physical comedy but a direct riff on Fennell’s own…
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‘A Wildflower, a Wasp, a Worm, or Some Dirt’: In Conversation with Matt Berninger
Artwork by Natasha Kawalek (2026) Matt Berninger is an American writer and singer. He is the frontman of The National, a rock band founded in New York in the early 2000s. Since then, the band has released ten studio albums and has collaborated with the likes of Taylor Swift and Sufjan Stevens. As well as…
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Hamnet: A Sea of Troubles
Artwork by Guido Maza (2026) Despite robust fan-fare and pre-emptive award ceremony capture, Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet seems now to be attracting a puzzling yet steady stream of online ire. The range of circumspectly approving discourse and acumen has given way to something more uneasy and polemical. To be sure, this movie has at made its…
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Marty Supreme’s Inglorious Victory
Artwork by Nathalie Thibault In the finale of Richard Linklater’s School of Rock (2003), Dewey Finn’s band of schoolchildren loses the battle of the bands to the protagonist’s previous outfit, No Vacancy. Among the chaos of the disquieted crowd a chant begins, beckoning School of Rock to play one more song in No Vacancy’s place,…
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Gentle Intervention: Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive
Artwork by Josse Mansilla (2026) Cambridge weekly essays are miserable. Every Tuesday — my dedicated ‘writing day’ — I wake to the frightful sight of six days’ worth of reading, knowing that within the next few hours all this careful work will be bent and slung into the shape of fifteen-hundred words. It’s a process of…
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Woolf’s Modernist Megalith: In Conversation with Tom Crewe
Artwork by Bradley Richards (2026) Tom Crewe (b.1989) is novelist and contributing editor for the LRB. I first came across Crewe’s work via his short story ‘The Room Service-Waiter’, featured in Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists 2023’, which stood out among that talented cohort for its deftness of style and quiet poignancy. Crewe’s debut…
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Literature should be a qualification for political office: Nicola Sturgeon
Artwork by Pia Blondel (2025) In September 2014, Nicola Sturgeon stood at the centre of one of the most consequential political moments in modern Scottish history. The independence referendum, held after years of mobilisation and debate, ended in defeat, with a slim majority (55%) voting to remain in the United Kingdom. For many politicians, such…
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No More Strife
Artwork by Xavier Oladuti (2026) Bryson Tiller, a.k.a Pen Griffey (or Slum Tiller) is an American ‘singer who raps’ hailing from Louisville, Kentucky. He is principally known for his 2015 debut album, Trapsoul, which is his most commercially successful and acclaimed album (the initial sour reviews notwithstanding). Trapsoul is regarded today as a landmark album…
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Poetry in Pilgrimage: In Conversation with Camille Ralphs
Artwork by Paolo Floriano Beneforti In a lecture hosted by the Whichcote Society last May, Camille Ralphs shared her experience as a poet walking the Camino de Santiago. Delivered in Ralphs’s full-bodied cadence (so very her own that I no longer find it possible to read her poetry without hearing it) and dense with journal…
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Life Lines: In Conversation with Ania Ready
Artwork by Kevin Lim It began, for Ania Ready, with a small sheet of paper. ‘There was a discovery made fairly recently’, she explains to me over Zoom, recalling how a historian, Dr. Myfanwy Lloyd, came upon a ‘folded up paper note in the archive of soldier, Arthur Tyler’. Tyler had been part of the…
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Vanishing Landscapes: In Conversation with Bonnie Lander Johnson
Artwork by Steven Mardones (2025) Bonnie Lander Johnson’s Vanishing Landscapes: The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them (Hodder Press, 2025) explores the histories of seven plants in Britain – apples, saffron, woad, reeds, oak, grapes and wheat. The book documents Bonnie’s conversations with people who keep traditional, local techniques of working with plants…
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Job Done: Wendy Cope at the Cambridge Literary Festival
Artwork by Elizabeth Murphy (2025) Wendy Cope in conversation with Alex Clark at the Cambridge Literary Festival, November 2025 Light is falling outside the Cambridge Union. Two large golden chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Rows of leather benches are packed with people, latecomers perch on windowsills. Photographers roam around the crowd’s edges. The clock has…
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Knocking Language Sideways: Seamus Heaney’s Collected Poems
Artwork by Josse Mansilla (2025) One Tuesday evening in October, within the eaves and red-gold curtains of the Old Divinity School at St John’s College, Cambridge, The Poems of Seamus Heaney was launched to a packed house with modest fanfare. As the book’s jacket sleeve reads, ‘[t]his is the long-awaited, definitive edition of Seamus Heaney’s…
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Isabelle Baafi Wins Best First Collection at the Forward Prize
Artwork by Elizabeth Murphy (2025) Minutes before being announced as winner of the Best First Collection at this year’s Forward Prizes for Poetry, Isabelle Baafi read one of the last poems included in her recently published collection Chaotic Good (2025). ‘Dear Eve (a letter to his second wife)’ begins in the Garden of Eden, a…
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Information is King: Thea Lenarduzzi’s The Tower
Artwork by Belén Navarro (2025) The stories we embark upon aren’t always the ones we end up telling. Several stories compete to be at the heart of The Tower, former Times Literary Supplement editor Thea Lenarduzzi’s new memoir following the success of Dandelions (2022). Ever since being told about Annie, a girl believed to have…
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Technicolour Victoriana: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein
Artwork by Josse Mansilla (2025) Del Toro’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s modern myth begins by going back to its source material. A Danish ship is stuck in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to the North Pole. The injured Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is found near-dead on the ice, pursued by the Creature (Jacob Elordi),…
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It Could be Sweet: Harold Offeh at Kettle’s Yard
Harold Offeh, Covers. After Betty Davis. They Say I’m Different, 1974 (2013), C-print. Courtesy of the artist. Entering the sliding doors on a dreary, rain-soaked November morning, hanging up my sodden jacket, and descending the steps into the foyer space that lies between the two main rooms of the Kettle’s Yard gallery, I was struck…
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On Reading by Algorithm
Artwork by Samy Benmayor (2025) For a moment before bed, I consider reading a book. I roll over, fling my phone away and examine my bookshelf. Which of these suits my mood? I bought The Secret History after TikTok served me a smorgasbord of dark academia visual tropes — think cable-knit sweaters, worn loafers, an…
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Mitchell Anderson: Starship Troopers
Fig. 1. Exhibition view of Starship Troopers, by Mitchell Anderson. 2025. V-2 rocket graphite rudder fragment (Germany c. 1994) on vellum, dimensions variable with installation. At the centre of Starship Troopers, Mitchell Anderson’s two-piece exhibition marking the end of his residency at Binz39 in Zurich, lies a single object: a graphite rudder fragment salvaged from…
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Sometimes Politicians Have To Lead: In Conversation with Diane Abbott
Troy Fielder sits down with Diane Abbott to discuss her new book, A Woman Like Me
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Our Material Dependency: in conversation with Ed Conway
Carmen Vintro sits down with Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky News, to discuss his book, Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
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‘Believe me, love, it was the nightingale’
Sophie Baptista on ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the RBO, and the enduring legacy of MacMillan’s masterpiece in light of the ballet’s 60th anniversary.
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Seascraper
Caitlin Kawalek speaks with Benjamin Wood, novelist and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College London, about his fifth novel, Seascraper
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Excess in a Time of Need and Plenty
Chiraag Shah on Picturing Excess: Jan Davidsz de Heem, at the Fitzwilliam
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Who’s Afraid of Judith Butler?
Carmen Vintro on Judith Butler: Who’s Afraid of Gender? at the Southbank Centre, in conversation with Ash Sarkar.
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Beyond Bloomsbury?: Carrington out of obscurity and into the shadows
James A.S. Sunderland on Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester
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Muckle Flugga
Caitlin Kawalek speaks with Michael Pedersen, Edinburgh Makar and writer-in-residence at The University of Edinburgh, about his upcoming novelistic debut.
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The Ghost of Edward Said
Elena Pare on ‘Edward Said: The Question of Palestine’ at the Southbank Centre, presented in cooperation with the Palestine Festival of Literature.
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Playing Psychosis: A Conversation with Lara Derham
Rosie Williams speaks with Lara Derham, Writer of Hellblade II: Senua’s Saga
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Whimsy and Wonder
Kiana Rezakhanlou on Daniel McKay’s Whimwondery: An Alphabetarium of Useful Nonsense Inventions
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Rewilding the Everyday: Robert Macfarlane and The World to Come
Carmen Vintro on Robert Macfarlane at the Southbank Centre
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Conversation Not Spectacle
Sophie Marie Niang on the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College.
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The Art of Slow Burn Looking
Carmen Vintro on Art Loan Schemes and acts of looking, in Cambridge and beyond.
The Camera 