Author: Desmond Bullen
Film Review: Explota explota (My Heart Goes Boom!), ¡Viva! 28th Spanish & Latin American Festival, HOME, Manchester
The anglicised title of Explota explota, a generous-spirited jukebox musical about Francoist Spain and dancing, is an irresistible invitation to declare, almost without shame, that the ¡Viva! 28th Spanish & Latin American Festival at Manchester’s HOME opens with a bang. Or should that be a ‘pop’?
Read the full story..Book Review: Dream Girl by Laura Lippman
It is hardly unusual these days to find that the protagonist of a widely admired paperback is a writer.
Read the full story..Exhibition Review: Archives at Play, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
Hard though it is to credit, Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery is fast approaching its ruby anniversary.
Read the full story..Book Review: The Stasi Poetry Circle by Philip Oltermann
If the past is, in L.P. Hartley’s endlessly quoted observation, a foreign country, then how much more disorientating must it be to attempt to find one’s bearings doubly lost, adrift both in the past and a foreign country?
Read the full story..Book Review: Why Karen Carpenter Matters by Karen Tongson
I always thought that there was something of the goth about Karen Carpenter.
Read the full story..Book Review: The House with Two Letter-Boxes by Janet H. Swinney
It’s easy to forget how relentlessly the years rack up, especially in the apparent pause of the past 20 months, leaving the shared certainties of what once seemed like the height of modernity to recede with deceptive speed until they finally appear, in the safety of hindsight, as at once quaint and faintly barbaric.
Read the full story..Common People: Breaking the Class Ceiling in UK Publishing
If there’s one thing the pandemic has brought home, it’s the importance of the uncelebrated.
Read the full story..Review: Utopias, The Whitworth, Manchester
For a time it seemed that Utopia had lost its currency.
Read the full story..Review: Eimear McBride, Martin Harris Centre, Manchester
The novels of Eimear McBride, you might say, begin where she once was – enduring the loss of a brother to a brain tumour, studying drama in London.
Read the full story..Theatre Review: Quality Street, The Lowry, Salford
For most people these days, J.M. Barrie’s name is linked entirely with his brainchild, a figure ambiguous enough to change with the shifting emphases of popular culture – Peter Pan, the child who never grew up.
Read the full story..Editor's Picks
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