The Telegraph9 hours agoA System so Magnificent it is Blinding by Amanda Svensson review: 2022’s maddest novel? 3*The Telegraph - By Amber MedlandAmanda Svensson’s new novel A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding lives up to the promise of its title. Riding a crest of near constant epiphany, it runs to 529 pages, and is written in long, reaching sentences that often run to five lines or more. It begins with the birth of a set of Swedish …
The Telegraph13 hours agoCan you be a mother and a great artist?The Telegraph - By Lucy ScholesIn October 1948, four months after her famous short story The Lottery was published in The New Yorker, arriving at the hospital to have her third baby, Shirley Jackson was asked by the admitting clerk what profession should be noted on her official record. “Writer,” Jackson told her. “Housewife,” …
The Telegraph16 hours agoAn Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West by Konstantin Kisin review: from Russia with loveThe Telegraph - By Douglas MurrayKonstantin Kisin is a young stand-up comedian and co-host of the popular online talk-show Triggernometry. There, with his co-host Francis Foster, he has interviewed scientists, authors, politicians and others, including the present reviewer. I am, I should say at the outset, an admirer of Kisin’s. …
The Telegraph20 hours agoThe alternative story of 20th-century classical music, from burning pianos to a 99-year-old nunThe Telegraph - By Ivan Hewett,The story of how classical music unfolded in the 20th century is notoriously hard to tell. In the early years, the narrative just about makes sense. Yes, there are the mavericks and outsiders, but the Austro-German core of classical music built by the canonical “masters”, from Bach to Brahms, still …
The Telegraph2 days agoMeet the madman who spent 200 days in the Chernobyl Exclusion ZoneThe Telegraph - By Jasper ReesChernobyl exerts a magnetic pull. Documentaries, horror films, Die Hard 5 and, in 2019, an award-wining television drama have all visited the poisoned well. More soberly, there is Chernobyl Prayer, the Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s mighty oral history. None of these quite prepares you …
The Telegraph3 days ago‘Normal’ doesn’t exist – and the search for it has ruined medicineThe Telegraph - By Tim Smith-Laing“Never get a medical test,” my father once advised me, “unless you already know what’s wrong.” Paradoxical advice, I thought, coming from a doctor. When I suggested as much, he explained that tests are guaranteed to show abnormalities, and while a layman might regard that as the precise point, …
