News and reviews

Edward Hopper featured in the Art Newspaper

Added on 20/10/2026

Around the age of 13, Edward Hopper converted the attic of the Nyack family home into a makeshift painting studio and private haven. Here he put into action his dream of becoming a painter. Though he had attempted some watercolours in the early 1890s, Hopper now began painting in oils, demonstrating a newfound artistic seriousness.

Paul Celan reviewed in the TLS

Added on 16/10/2026

Like that of Byron or Rimbaud, the life of the German Jewish poet Paul Celan lends itself to mythologizing. Born in 1920 on the eastern fringes of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, swept up in the Nazi Holocaust, which killed both his parents, Celan made his way to Paris after years in a Romanian labour camp, married a wealthy aristocrat …

Sacred Betrayal reviewed in the Jewish Chronicle

Added on 16/10/2026

Between March 1942 and the liberation of France from Nazi rule, some 80,000 French and foreign-born Jews, including 11,400 children, were deported from France to their deaths in the concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz.

97 Fights reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 13/10/2026

In 1891, in Thomas Edison’s makeshift film studio – a shack in West Orange, New Jersey – two men put on gloves and solemnly set about the serious business of battering each other senseless while Edison’s camera steadily watched. The resulting film, Men Boxing, lasted just a few seconds. There was no crowd, no purse and no title at stake; the fighters don’t even have names.

Studio Aalto featured in the Guardian

Added on 13/10/2026

In the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo propheta in patria: “No man is a prophet in his own land”.

Leopard in the Garden reviewed in the LRB

Added on 08/10/2026

The modern zoo is nearly two centuries old. The zoological gardens in Regent’s Park were established in 1828 by the inventor Humphry Davy and the colonial adventurer Stamford Raffles, founder of modern Singapore. It was a fitting collaboration: encompassing the globe and studying its minutiae were different aspects of the same imperial ambition.

Medea reviewed in the Observer

Added on 07/10/2026

Growing up, many young girls look up to a real or fictional idol. Although it may seem like an odd or even concerning choice, as a 14-year-old mine was Medea. Hailing from far-off Colchis, in modern-day Georgia, Medea was a sorceress of divine descent who, in Greek mythology, helped the hero Jason in his dangerous quest to retrieve the golden fleece.

Apocalypse Baroque reviewed in the TLS

Added on 02/10/2026

Four and a half years into Russia’s war against Ukraine, the speculation is: how will it end? Startlingly, the Ukrainians may be the ones to decide. Their army is inflicting more than 1,000 Russian casualties a day along the front, and with brilliantly planned attacks on Russian oil refineries, weapons factories, economic hubs, the Russian navy in the Black Sea and occupied Crimea, the impetus is set to continue.

97 Fights reviewed in the TLS

Added on 02/10/2026

The long-awaited fight between the British former world heavyweight champions Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua is within touching distance after their recent, lacklustre wins over Mariusz Wach and Kristian Prenga respectively. Neither contest could rival the fight it is supposed to lead towards. That is the point.

The Fifth Crusade reviewed in the TLS

Added on 02/10/2026

What has a battle fought in what is now southeast Turkmenistan in May 1040 to do with the fall of Jerusalem to the First Crusade in July 1099? A great deal, says Nicholas Morton, whose new book examines the westerners’ conquests in the Levant between the crusaders’ arrival in Syria in 1097 and Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem in 1187.

Silence Dressed in Cyrillic Letters reviewed in the TLS

Added on 02/10/2026

“War is a myopic seamstress”, Iya Kiva wrote in 2021, a year before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “who keeps cutting language after language from our tongue”. These lines, beautifully translated into English by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, are especially resonant for those who, like Kiva, know both Ukrainian, the language in which they were composed, and Russian, the language the poet grew up speaking in eastern Ukraine, but in which she now refuses to write.

Sophie Oliver writes in the TLS

Added on 02/10/2026

At the ambivalent heart of “A Fable for Christians”, which Rebecca West wrote in 1916, is a dress. It is a “mad” confection in green and blue stripes, “designed by a scatter-brained person who was thinking of the waves, early Victorian fashion, the wild formality of an elfin court”.