News and reviews

Heather Buckingham writes in the Big Issue

Added on 28/09/2026

To build a future in which food banks are no longer needed is to build a future in which everyone can afford the essentials. And to build that future, we arguably need to build a future in which almost everyone can afford not just the essentials but a decent standard of living, almost all of the time.

A Death of One’s Own extracted in the Tablet

Added on 24/09/2026

One might claim that the most accurate image of death is birth, which must feel to the baby like the loss of the whole world. Perhaps if we were less well schooled in sup pressing our feelings we would howl like a newborn infant on our deathbeds. It is as though at birth we are thrust out of an over powering plenitude, one which fits our flesh as snugly as an extra skin, into the inter minable abyss of the real.

Fallout reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 24/09/2026

Thirty-two​ years ago, in one of the last and least remembered crises of the 20th century, the United States came to the brink of war over the spread of nuclear weapons. Less than a year and a half into his first term, Bill Clinton was shown evidence that North Korea had removed fuel rods from a plutonium reactor, the first step towards creating the raw material for nuclear warheads.

Taj Ali writes in the Guardian

Added on 23/09/2026

There it was: a pool of blood spreading across the pavement. A section of the high street had been cordoned off and a uniformed police officer gestured for bystanders to move along. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and a racist murder had stunned Southall in west London.

Sniff reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 12/09/2026

For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress.

Smell reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 12/09/2026

For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress.

Archbishop, Chancellor, Kingmaker reviewed in the LRB

Added on 10/09/2026

In a​ 2005 poll to find the most infamous British villains of the last millennium, Thomas Arundel unexpectedly won the 15th-century nomination, emerging in the public eye as more dastardly than Richard III and as wicked as Jack the Ripper and Oswald Mosley.

danah boyd writes in the Guardian

Added on 10/09/2026

97 Fights reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 09/09/2026

Even before boxing had its Queensberry Rules, it had ‘the Fancy’. In the bare-knuckle days when matches could go on for hours and rounds were counted by the dozen, there were always well-heeled types in the front row of spectators, laying wagers and often setting up the matches themselves between ‘their’ champions.

Desk Revolutionaries reviewed in History Today

Added on 09/09/2026

The Directory, the regime which ruled France during the closing years of the revolutionary decade, took its name from the five-man executive body that was elected by a two-chamber legislature, according to the Constitution of 1795.

The Country House at War reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 05/09/2026

Ever since Brideshead Revisited, both the book and two television series, there has been a fascination with what some of us thought of as the last knockings of the country house, as once splendid aristocratic mansions sank beneath Nissen huts, mistreatment by the armed forces and lack of maintenance during the second world war.

Bedlam reviewed in the Tablet

Added on 03/09/2026

“Perhaps it is the story that chooses the man and wraps him in it until he suffocates.” Thus observes Richard Dadd (inset) ruefully at the start of Jennifer Higgie’s Bedlam, which tracks “a year in the life” of the Victorian artist, celebrated for his depictions of fairies, that would change his life forever.