News and reviews
The Midlife Mind: essay in the TLS
Added on 04/05/2021
Kafka’s metamorphosis happens to us all. The question is not how to resist it, but how to respond. Time is the one universal element of the human condition; although all organic beings are subject to it, we are – we think – the only species that is fully conscious of it.
READ MOREJohn Craxton recommended in the Evening Standard
Added on 03/05/2021
The adventures of a bohemian artist are brought to life in spectacular colour in this vivid and uplifting biography. For someone whose friendships spanned from Lucien Freud and the writer Paddy Leigh Fermor to Dame Margot Fonteyn and Sir David Attenborough, the artist John Craxton remains relatively little known.
READ MOREMidnight in Cairo reviewed in The Observer
Added on 02/05/2021
The birth of the women’s movement in Egypt is not usually associated with music hall singers, dancers and actresses. But it was on the stages of theatres and nightclubs in Cairo, in the roaring 20s, that early feminists first asserted themselves…
READ MOREMidnight in Cairo recommended in The Times
Added on 01/05/2021
‘What Raphael Cormack… has done in Midnight in Cairo is to turn his academic researches into a spectacular parade of the extraordinary, bold and brash Egyptian women who shot to fame in the early years of globalised celebrity culture.’
READ MOREThe Life of Music recommended in The Times
Added on 01/05/2021
Nicholas Kenyon is an amiable and enthusiastic guide to a thousand years of classical music.
READ MOREReckless Opportunists referenced in The Guardian
Added on 29/04/2021
People like Johnson have always been around, as Fitzgerald reminds us. The most troubling question is how he came to be prime minister. Part of the answer lies in the sociologist Aeron Davis’s masterly study of the new power elites, Reckless Opportunists
READ MORELA Graffiti Black Book reviewed in UP Magazine
Added on 26/04/2021
The purpose of a Black Book goes beyond practice sessions and mastering skills. It’s the artist’s journal. A chronicle of the evolution of skills. The historical documentation of the artist’s art.
READ MOREThe Life of Music extracted in The Daily Telegraph
Added on 26/04/2021
Music can never be confined to a single tradition – and we should celebrate that sparky, vibrant mixture in live form. How can we sum up where the performance of music has come from and where it is going next?
READ MOREInfinitely Full of Hope featured in New Critique
Added on 25/04/2021
What exactly can give us hope today? Where is hope to be found? The short answer is: hope lies in children and the generations to come. For Whyman, the issue is personal as well political…
READ MORETo Kidnap a Pope recommended in the Literary Review
Added on 23/04/2021
Caiani relates this dramatic story in telling detail but never loses sight of the broader picture, and uses his archival discoveries to excellent effect.
READ MOREYou’re History reviewed in 4columns
Added on 23/04/2021
Here comes Lesley Chow to the rescue with You’re History: The Twelve Strangest Women in Music, a wonderfully provocative and thought-provoking polemic that reveals and revels in a different way of responding to pop.
READ MOREJoseph Conrad reviewed in the TLS
Added on 22/04/2021
Robert Hampson’s study is comparatively slim, at around 200 pages. Yet, the most distilled of Conrad’s biographies, it creates its own distinctive image of this constant searcher after le mot juste.
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