Reviews
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Excess in a Time of Need and Plenty
Chiraag Shah on Picturing Excess: Jan Davidsz de Heem, at the Fitzwilliam
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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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Conversation Not Spectacle
Sophie Marie Niang on the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College.
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Smoky Capital of Another World
Iris Bowdler on Monet and London, Views of the Thames, at the Courtauld
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“Collective tissue”
Rachel Rees speaks to Helen Charman about her new book Mother State, and ideas of motherhood through Thatcher, austerity — and tradwives.
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Peak Goop
Elizabeth Murphy and Troy Fielder speak to James Riley about his new book Well Beings, a cultural history of wellness from the 1970s to modern-day Goop-mania.
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By dint of geology: In Conversation with Andrew McMillan
Troy Fielder speaks to Andrew McMillan, award-winning poet and author, about his debut novel, Pity.
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Revolution, flames, and tortured bodies
Iris Bowdler and Rachel Rees review William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
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History as story, story as history
Elizabeth Murphy and Rachel Rees speak to Professor Clair Wills about her memoir Missing Persons, reframing illegitimacy, and the intertwining of familial and national secrets in 20th century Ireland.
The Camera 