MIK SABIERS savours the first headline solo show of the stalwart of Brighton’s indie-punk outfit Blood Red Shoes
Latest editorial
Biography: Joseph Conrad
Enlightening overview of a literary pioneer
SPOOKY: Russian spy Verloc (Toby Jones, right) is instructed by Vladimir (David Dawson) to blow up the Greenwich Observatory in 2016 BBC production of The Secret Agent
New releases reviewed by IAN SINCLAIR
STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
IN A Penguin readers’ list of the 100 must-read classic novels, Joseph Conrad appears only once, at number 92.
Unsurprisingly, the named work is his short novella Heart of Darkness, often found on college syllabuses and the subject of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 blockbuster film, Apocalypse Now, which relocated the action from the menacing hinterland of the turn-of-the-century Congo to the US genocide in Vietnam.
Designed for the student and the general reader, Robert Hampson’s short biography of Conrad opens with a survey of the shifting literary reputation of the novelist, who has been widely acknowledged as a master stylist and innovator in the emerging 20th-century modern novel.
More from this author
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
GORDON PARSONS meditates on the appetite of contemporary audiences for the obscene cruelty of Shakespeare’s Roman nightmare
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
GORDON PARSONS welcomes a graphic biography of George Sand, the most popular French novelist in 19th-century Britain
