WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Female polyphony
FIONA O’CONNOR marvels at a highly original collection of essays that explores the changing status and the meanings made by women’s voices
MEMORABLE: (L to R): Gertrude Stein in 1905 by Pablo Picasso and Nathalie Quintane in 2021
[(L to R) Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly/Public; domain DeuxPlusQuatre/CC] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
Chicanes
By Clara Schulmann
Les Fugitives Press, £12.99
“BAD seed” is the literal translation of this book’s original French title, Zizanies. The title refers to troublesome women – disrupters, complainers, women who choose trouble rather than swallowing their anger.
In Chicanes, French art critic Clara Schulmann gathers numerous excellent artists and thinkers, women all, surrounding herself with their voices as she considers challenges to her own life.
The book is a seed catalogue of sorts; translated from the French and published by Les Fugitives, it brings together ideas and discourses from a wide range of arts: literature, film, painting and sculpture. The author delves into the voices of other women to consider her own fresh losses – a relationship break-up and a much loved job suddenly withdrawn. Commonplace happenings, Schulmann notes, but she uses them to devolve a multiform response in conversation with woman.
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FIONA O’CONNOR steps warily through a novel that skewers many of the exposed flanks of the over-privileged
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