News and reviews

The Lake Poets extract in the Observer

Added on 19/10/2025

Thirty years after William Wordsworth died, the Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley walked around Grasmere chatting to the locals and seeking memories of the great poet. To Rawnsley, a late 19th-century man of letters, this must have seemed a rich seam to hack into because Wordsworth had by then been lionised as a giant of English poetry.

Storyteller reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/10/2025

Robert Louis Stevenson is chiefly remembered for the creation of the archetypal Jekyll and Hyde (1886), so strangely or perhaps not so strangely foreshadowing the crimes of Jack the Ripper, and for his tales of boyhood adventure – Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893).

Mistress reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/10/2025

One word appeared in almost every headline about the tragic story of Constance Marten’s baby, and it was not “manslaughter”. Marten was, in the eyes of journalists, an “aristocrat”, and had she not been brought up in a large country house, on an estate that had belonged to her family since the sixteenth century, her trial would never have provoked such frenzied interest.

America’s Middle East reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 13/10/2025

Marc Lynch is angry. The word ‘rage’ appears six times on the first page, and comes in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. This should be sufficient warning to anyone expecting a cool, calm, dispassionate analysis of the Middle East that they might have picked up the wrong book.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes mention in the Observer

Added on 12/10/2025

“Opera and ballet will be at the heart of the culture of many people who live in London and the south of England,” former Conservative minister Jake Berry (now a member of Reform UK) once told parliament. “But for many of us in the north it is our local football club – our Glyndebourne, Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House or Royal Shakespeare Company will be Blackburn Rovers, Accrington Stanley, Barrow, Carlisle or Sunderland.”

Love is Resistance featured in Dazed

Added on 10/10/2025

Published by Saqi Books and currently available for pre-order, Love is Resistance features 77 commissioned tear-out posters by artists, writers, students, and activists from around the world. In a conversation with the book’s author and founding editor, Aya Mousawi, alongside contributor Shumon Basar, we learn about the powerful role poster-making can wield.

Multicultural Britain featured in the Observer

Added on 10/10/2025

Thirty years ago, the Birmingham-born musician Steven Kapur – better known by his stage name, Apache Indian – released his second album, Make Way for the Indian. Like his first record, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Mercury prize, the album was a pioneering mix of Kapur’s key musical influences: Jamaican reggae, dancehall and traditional Indian bhangra.

Enshittification excerpt in the Guardian

Added on 05/10/2025

It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with.

British Blonde reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/10/2025

What do we think of when we think of blondes? Perhaps Scandinavia, where blonde hair is commonplace, or iconic blonde stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. Sexy Swedes, brash Americans or free-spirited Frenchwomen – not Britishness, that’s for sure.

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