Koudelka Gypsies by Josef Koudelka and Will Guy – review
Josef Koudelka's photographs of Gypsies in the 1960s and 70s show nomadic life at its most romanticBetween 1962 and 1971, Josef Koudelka travelled throughout his native Czechoslovakia and beyond to rural Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. His main sub...
Lynne Ramsay: ‘Just talk to me straight’
The Scottish director is back with a highly acclaimed adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Turns out there's plenty she needs to talk about tooIn one of several disturbing scenes in Lynne Ramsay's new film, We Need to Talk About Kevin , Eva, the ...
Philosophers set in stone: Steve Pyke’s piercing portraits
For over 30 years he has photographed famous faces. Now Steve Pyke's second volume of portraits of the world's great thinkers lays bare his talent for mapping the human faceThe most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your cam...
Jerome Liebling obituary
Socially conscious US photographer who focused on 'the everyday, the ordinary'The American photographer Jerome Liebling, who has died aged 87, once said that his motivation was "to figure out where the pain was, and to show things that p...
The Heath by Andy Sewell – review
Andy Sewell's evocative photographs of Hampstead Heath capture the hinterland between the created and the wild"I go to the Heath to be somewhere that feels natural," writes Andy Sewell in the succinct introduction to his book of photographs of Hampstea...
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones – review
This persuasive book about the label 'chav' makes a nonsense of the idea that Britain is now classless"Class is a communist concept," Margaret Thatcher told Newsweek in 1992. "It groups people together and sets them against each other." Just over a dec...
Anne Enright: ‘I was always on the side. Like a salad’
Anne Enright on life after winning the Booker, the appeal of flawed women and why her latest novel is a 'less uneasy' readI am having lunch with Anne Enright in a restaurant in Dun Laoghaire, which lies between the city of Dublin, where she was born an...
Analogue artists defying the digital age
Dusty vinyl records, vintage film cameras, rickety typewriters and antiquated recording equipment … these are the creative tools being used by some emerging artists. Pure nostalgia? Or a laudable refusal to escape the speed and sanitised perfection o...
Dermot Healy: ‘I try to stay out of it and let the reader take over’
Irish author Dermot Healy has long been admired for his fiercely singular style. He tells Sean O'Hagan how his latest novel was shaped largely by what he decided to leave outThere are moments during my interview with Dermot Healy when it feels like I a...
The Grand Trunk Road by Tim Smith – review
A journey along the main artery of northern India throws up deep riches from history and lifeIn his novel, Kim, Rudyard Kipling describes the Grand Trunk Road, stretching from Calcutta to Kabul, as "a wonderful spectacle" that "runs straight, bearing w...
Starman: David Bowie by Paul Trynka; Any Day Now by Kevin Cann – reviews
Two Bowie biographies shed new light on the career of pop's greatest chameleon, but the man himself remains elusiveIn 1971, David Bowie's bullish new manager, Tony Defries, walked into the office of RCA in New York for a meeting with the heads of a rec...
Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic by Fintan O’Toole – review
Fintan O'Toole's manifesto for a new Ireland is radical and rooted in decencyIn Ship of Fools, published this time last year, the Irish Times journalist Fintan O'Toole laid bare the causes of – and castigated those responsible for – Ireland's ongoi...
