News and reviews

The Cancelled Prime Minister reviewed in the LRB

Added on 04/06/2026

It looks like​ Britain’s long-standing electoral duopoly is coming to an end. Even though Labour won a huge majority in the 2024 general election, the combined vote share of the two main parties dropped below 60 per cent, the lowest on record.

Wired Together reviewed in the TLS

Added on 29/05/2026

The term neuroscience was first used by the biophysicist Francis Schmitt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962. The Society for Neuroscience held its first meeting in 1971, attracting a scant 1,400 attendees.

Atlas’s Bones reviewed in the TLS

Added on 29/05/2026

In the Middle Ages at least, D. Vance Smith reminds us, Europeans “thought about Africa in complex, nuanced, and profound ways”. Africa’s influence on Europe has been forgotten, in other words.

A Woman Named Edith reviewed in the TLS

Added on 29/05/2026

Anyone who thinks of writing a book on the history of intelligence secrets, especially if they have not tried the subject before, should begin by reading Harold Nicolson’s account of meeting Proust during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Courting Disaster reviewed in the TLS

Added on 29/05/2026

Zoë McGee is angry, and with good reason. Courting Disaster: Reading between the lines of the Regency novel is shaped by the rage at the heart of the #MeToo movement. Beginning in a university consent workshop and finishing with an icy nod towards the White House, McGee takes the reader by way of incels, tradwives, Sarah Everard, Brock Turner, Elliot Rodger and more.

The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living reviewed in the TLS

Added on 29/05/2026

Should the Middle Ages be a model for modern life? The period hardly seems promising, with its religious violence, pandemics and penchant for fart jokes. Yet a number of books published in recent years, from Jamie Kreiner’s The Wandering Mind: What medieval monks tell us about distraction (TLS, June 30, 2023) to Annette Kehnel’s The Green Ages: Medieval innovations in sustainability (TLS, October 18, 2024), have sought to show that the medieval world has lessons to teach us.

Stephen Sondheim reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 21/05/2026

Among the many great pleasures of Daniel Okrent’s new biography of Stephen Sondheim – a book perfectly weighted between the gossipy and erudite – is its rendering of the milieu beyond its immediate subject.

Caroline Aherne reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 20/05/2026

From the 1990s until her tragically early death in 2016, Caroline Aherne was a fixture of British primetime television. This new study of her work reminds us of the punk spirit behind it all. Aherne was the deceptively vicious chatshow host Mrs Merton.

Love and Terror reviewed in the Telegraph

Added on 19/05/2026

Marked by Time reviewed in Nature

Added on 18/05/2026

In Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, gang leader Alex DeLarge is portrayed as an ultraviolent miscreant. Once imprisoned, he is subjected to aversion therapy, which serves only to reinforce the deeply rooted nature of his criminal disposition.

Andrew Curran writes in the Big Issue

Added on 17/05/2026

Writing or teaching about the subject of this book, the history of race, is no longer simply about the past; it is decidedly about our present. Yet it remains imperative to go back to the 18th century and even earlier to understand where the most dangerous idea ever invented came from.

What Did You Hear reviewed in Prospect

Added on 15/05/2026

Here we go again. Back to “Yesterday”. Back to “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Except: today looks very much like yesterday and those times ain’t a-changed one bit. The pop charts are still dominated by semi-literate two-chord jingles.