News and reviews

The Long Death of Adolf Hitler reviewed in the Big Issue

Added on 07/02/2026

Around 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. His physical exit from this world was swift, yet in cultural terms the Nazi dictator has taken an extraordinarily long time to die.

The Bagpipes reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/02/2026

I was once introduced at the Edinburgh book festival by a man holding his nose, intoning a string of notes and wriggling his fingers around. He was a journalist and critic, a sophisticated and knowledgeable writer and a Scot. What was he doing?

Lithuania reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/02/2026

Lithuania was the last major pagan principality in Europe, worshipping its own array of gods until Grand Duke Jogaila converted to Roman Catholicism in 1386 to marry a twelve-year-old Polish princess and become king of Poland.

Captive Gods reviewed in Church Times

Added on 06/02/2026

Professor Appiah, the author of this erudite book, gave the Reith Lectures in 2016: “discussing ways in which people’s thinking about religion, nation, race and culture often reflects misunderstandings about identity” (BBC depiction).

Speaking with Nature reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/02/2026

In the early 1960s, India faced the prospect of famine after a series of monsoon failures. In 1968, its government launched its Green Revolution, led by an agricultural scientist, to promote high-yielding hybrid varieties of wheat and rice grown with large infusions of water and chemical fertilizers

Montevideo: A Novel reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/02/2026

Words are poor mountaineers and poor miners”, lamented the young Franz Kafka. “They cannot bring down the treasure from the mountains’ peaks or up from the mountains’ depths.” The failure of language to live up to these – strikingly manly – standards was driven home in this case by their being inscribed in the commonplace book of a teenage girl (Selma Kohn, whom Kafka was attempting to woo).

The Fiery Spirits reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/02/2026

William Strode is not exactly a household name. A burly Devonian, he achieved his moment of fame on January 4, 1642, when Charles I attempted to seize him in the House of Commons, along with four of his colleagues.

The Medieval Horse reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/02/2026

Look just about anywhere in the medieval past – to war, transport, agriculture, social markers, literature – and you find horses. These living things are so implicit in sources about medieval life as often to be invisible. Anastasija Ropa insists that to understand the medieval world, we must recognize their role.

The Medieval Moon reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/02/2026

Something fundamental changed in our relationship with the moon when we realized we could touch it. With the moon landing of 1969, and earlier, with the first Soviet satellite impacting its surface in 1959, something mysterious was lost. Now that billionaires have the entire galaxy in their sights, even the wonder of those milestones feels quaint.

Serhiy Zhadan featured in the Economist

Added on 05/02/2026

Serhiy Zhadan (pictured) is not your average soldier. He is a poet, novelist and rockstar, who is used to performing in front of crowds of thousands. Anyone who claims poetry is dead has not been to his readings: some 4,000 people at a time have attended them in Kyiv.

Seeing Baya reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 05/02/2026

André Breton gave one of the best descriptions: ‘the rocket I’ll call Baya’. He also gave some of the worst: ‘a being as frail as she is talented’, ‘the child that is Baya’. Excitement vibrates around the subject of Alice Kaplan’s biography Seeing Baya.

Troublemaker reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 05/02/2026

When Deborah Cavendish, duchess of Devonshire, died at the age of 94 in September 2014, the obituary headlines rang the changes on ‘the end of an era’ and ‘the last of the Mitford sisters’. If the first was true, the second was not. It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords.