News and reviews

Holly Smith writes in the Guardian

Added on 01/10/2025

There is nothing, it seems to me, more appalling, more deadening in the urban landscape than a uniform mass of low buildings covering acres and acres … High dwellings – I think, really very high dwellings – are an enormous enhancement of the scene.”

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Mrs Dalloway mention in the Guardian

Added on 27/09/2025

A trio of early stories by Virginia Woolf which together form a spoof biography of a family friend have been rediscovered and are set to be published next month.

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Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript reviewed in the LRB

Added on 25/09/2025

At two o’clock​ in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was on fire.

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Orbán featured in the Economist

Added on 23/09/2025

The hard right is on the march in Europe. The Alternative for Germany, a party declared extremist by domestic spooks, scored a record result in a national election in February.

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Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House reviewed in the Observer

Added on 21/09/2025

The Lovell Health House, completed in 1930, a composition of white planes miraculously poised over a steep slope near the Hollywood Hills, is the consummation of a love affair. On the one hand, there was the avant garde of central Europe, from where the house’s architect, Richard Neutra, came with an admiration for the industrial technology and can-do attitude of the United States.

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Storyteller reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 19/09/2025

The  discriminating Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges once revealed his fondness for ‘hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson’ – a list that was quirky and eclectic, adjectives that neatly encapsulate Robert Louis Stevenson himself.

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Between the Salt and the Ash reviewed in Church Times

Added on 19/09/2025

The poet and writer Jake Morris-Campbell was born in South Shields in 1988. My family came from a couple of miles to the north of there, on the other side of the River Tyne.

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Ann Pettifor writes in the Guardian

Added on 18/09/2025

Over a year into power, Starmer’s government is floundering – but it still has time on its side. In the first of a two-part series, our panelists recommend ways it can save itself

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Family Romance reviewed in the LRB

Added on 17/09/2025

There are​ few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses.

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Dr Bot reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 10/09/2025

One evening during my anaesthesiology career, I walked towards the hospital parking lot, where I saw a surgeon kissing a nurse in a dark corner. I was surprised, as I thought the surgeon had been dating a different nurse.

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Alchemy reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 05/09/2025

Alchemy, astrology and medicine (before the triumph of germ theory): three worthless intellectual systems which provided a good living for many into the 18th century and even beyond.

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Dr Bot featured in the Daily Mail

Added on 05/09/2025

What is the future of health care? Will it have a human face? Or will we all be making appointments to see what Blease calls Dr. Bot, an AI-powered physician.

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