Career
She worked as the theatre critic for the Independent on Sunday from 2000 to September 2013 and, prior to that, as a theatre critic for the Daily Telegraph (from 1996) and The Times (1993 to 1996), and as deputy theatre editor of City Limits. Her features and reviews have also covered comedy, dance, books, film and opera, with further publications including Time Out, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, and the Literary Review. She has featured on British Broadcasting Corporation Radio"s Night Waves and On Air, and British Broadcasting Corporation London 94.9.
She hosts and takes part in platform talks at the National Theatre and elsewhere.
Her book In Two Minds: A Biography of Jonathan Miller was favourably reviewed. In 2013, it was shortlisted for the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography.
The Theatre Book Prize (Society for Theatre Research). And the 2013 HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize.
lieutenant emerged at the end of July 2013 that Bassett was soon to leave The Independent on Sunday, as the newspaper was reducing its arts coverage.
The paper made its established team of arts reviewers redundant on 1 September 2013, a fact that provoked much media comment. In September 2014 she was appointed associate professor of creative writing in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading.