Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond the Solar System
By Richard Swan From the time the human species developed eyes, we have stared up at the skies and speculated about the stars and the…
Review Samples - Page 2
Reviewing is a separate art form in terms of writing. It takes on a different tone, format, and style compared to academic writing. Look at our review samples to get better acquainted with review writing.
Being Cross with Trump
By Luke Douglas-Home You may have seen it at one of the many documentary festivals it has wowed, in Sheffield, Edinburgh, Birmingham or Toronto. You…
An ‘Oliver!’ for the 21st century
By Matt Trueman Matilda’s got its own Spiderman in the first five minutes: a spoilt brat in crude, homemade fancy dress. The RSC’s homegrown musical…
Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, by Rob Lyons
By Jason Smith ‘Fish and chips are indigestible, expensive and unwholesome’. Eating them causes secondary poverty, which arises from the incompetent and immoral misapplication of…
A History of the World Since 9/11, by Dominic Streatfeild
By Patrick West Anti-Americanism has not always been the preserve of the liberal-left in Britain. In the UK, for instance, a not-uncommon response among conservatives…
Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth
By Nicky Charlish Every crime writer sets his or her fictional detective some challenges to face. With this book, she sets herself one, too: how…
Wuthering Heights
By David Birch The tagline of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights—‘Love is a force of nature’—is almost too good. As a selling-point, it is best not…
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, by Pankaj Mishra
By Sam Burt The 21st century will be Asia’s century, but it won’t necessarily be an Asian century; this seems to be the take-home message…
Certified Copy
By Valentine Rossetti Persian director and pioneer of Iranian new wave cinema Abbas Kiarostami graces the silver screen with his oeuvre once more. Not since…
Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk
By Jake Hollis Heard of Chuck Palahniuk? He wrote the novel Fight Club, more popularly known through the film it inspired, starring Brad Pitt and…
When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation
By Luke Gittos The upcoming general election will see the political class fighting for the attention of voters who appear to have given up on…
Letter from an Unknown Woman
By Timandra Harkness It is a glorious film, but you could not make it now. And that is not just my opinion. My preview screening…
My Name is Khan
By Cheryl Hudson My Name is Khan broke global box office records as the largest grossing Bollywood movie worldwide in its opening weekend, including in…
Undertow
By Valentine Rossetti It is very rare to find a film where the sentiment stays with you for days after, but Undertow, the first feature-length…
Hamlet
By Matt Trueman Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet is a marked man; most definitely ‘the observed of all observers’. The Elsinore he inhabits is a surveillance state.…
The Education of a British-Protected Child, by Chinua Achebe
By Jo Caird 2008 was the 50-year anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, the book that is widely regarded as the first African…
Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton
By Dolan Cummings Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland sees Lewis Carroll’s Alice returning to ‘Underland’ at the age of 19, falling down a hole in…
Mouchette, directed by Robert Bresson
By Dan Schneider Right on the heels of his great 1966 film, Au Hasard Balthazar, French film director Robert Bresson embarked on another exploration of…
3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch
By Austin Williams The agonising and ultimately redemptive tale of the trapped Chilean miners captured the world’s hearts and headlines. At the time of writing,…
The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
By Wes Brown Martin Amis burst onto the seventies literary circuit, an ‘enfant terrible’, only twenty-four and yet apparently fully-formed—The Rachel Papers (1973), Dead Babies…