News and reviews

Come What May, We’re Here to Stay reviewed in History Today

Added on 11/11/2026

Taj Ali’s book begins with the violent assault of a South Asian man in Hartlepool while onlookers cheer, one of them shouting ‘a Paki got banged’. In nearby Middlesbrough a group of white men establish a checkpoint to interrogate the ethnicity of passing drivers.

Tojo reviewed in the LRB

Added on 05/11/2026

Early in July 1942, people on Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaidō became aware that a man was rifling through their rubbish bins. This would have been peculiar behaviour under any circumstances, but the man was their prime minister.

The Accused reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2026

In 1941, a woman named Ruth H was running a garage-rental business in Nazi Germany. She was not a member of the Nazi Party, but she did belong to a regime-aligned women’s business organisation. One day, Ruth noticed one of her customers, a tobacco salesman named Stefan, driving his company car.

A Woman Named Edith reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2026

Her name makes her sound like a middle-class Englishwoman, or one of John Betjeman’s suburban tennis girls. But Edith Tudor Hart was not like that at all. She was born Edith Suschitzky, into a family of educated and assimilated Jews in Vienna.

Sniff reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2026

Smell is the most undervalued of our senses, the one that (according to surveys) most people would jettison if they had to lose one of the five. When we do use our noses, we encounter a confusing olfactory ‘world of simulacra in which anything can smell like anything else’, as William Tullett puts it.

A Meeting on Mincing Lane reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2026

When anyone mentions the great amateurs that made Georgian England such an exuberant place, we tend to think of the antiquarian Horace Walpole, the recluse Henry Cavendish, the botanist Sir Joseph Banks or the architect Richard Boyle, all of whom had a passion for fields of study in which they had little or no formal training but to which they made signal contributions.

A Meeting on Mincing Lane reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 31/10/2026

One day during the summer of 1765 a young black man, an enslaved person called Jonathan Strong, stumbled into a doctor’s surgery on Mincing Lane, off Fenchurch Street in the City of London. He was seriously injured, having been badly beaten about the face by his ‘owner’, and there were fears he might lose his sight.

Dorothea Tanning reviewed in the TLS

Added on 30/10/2026

In an interview for a catalogue essay of 1979, the surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning recalled her home town of Galesburg, Illinois: “Nothing happen[ed there]”, Tanning said, “but the wallpaper”.

Anni Albers reviewed in the TLS

Added on 30/10/2026

In mid-December 1929, a tiny four-seater airplane took off from an airfield just outside Dessau carrying an angel figure packed with gifts to surprise the Bauhaus master Paul Klee on his fiftieth birthday.

The Age of Microbes reviewed in New Scientist

Added on 28/10/2026

It’s 2030. Heatwaves are scorching parts of the globe, while elsewhere, hailstorms or tsunamis ravage homes, cities and farmlands. Wildfires rage across continents, Arctic ice sheets dwindle, volcanoes spew left and right, and Earth cracks open along multiple fault lines. Death tolls – human, animal and plant – soar.

Lewis Bassett writes in the Guardian

Added on 27/10/2026

No discerning dinner party host in England would dream of serving their guests a traditional English ham. You might find jamón ibérico, of which Spain is so proud, but never stuffed chine, a shoulder cut of salted pork marbled with parsley, once a delicacy in Lincolnshire.

Taj Ali interview in the Morning Star

Added on 23/10/2026

The red-brick home in Cromwell Avenue, Highgate, was a typical piece of London suburbia. Built in the late-1800s, it was designed for a well-to-do family.