News and reviews
Secrets of Great Ocean Liners featured in the Telegraph
Added on 17/11/2020
In this exclusive extract from his book, ‘Secrets of the Great Ocean Liners’, John G Sayers recalls the golden age of transatlantic travel. During the 1930s, factories were closed around the globe, many people were unemployed …
READ MOREDislocating the Orient and The Ruins Lesson featured in the TLS
Added on 13/11/2020
Daniel Foliard’s Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854–1921 (Chicago) skilfully examines Victorian and Edwardian conceptions of another “East”, revealing how spiritual journeys …
READ MOREThe Book of Sleep reviewed in 4Columns
Added on 13/11/2020
Catherine of Siena, nurse to victims of the Black Plague in the 1340s, was one of the eminent refusers of rest. Every two days she would “pay the debt of sleep to the body,” as she called it, with a half-hour nap, but otherwise …
READ MOREImogen Cunningham featured in the Guardian
Added on 11/11/2020
Few women chose to become photographers at the beginning of the 20th century, yet Cunningham’s images – from female nudes to Hollywood portraits – smoothed the way for countless female artists that followed.
READ MOREAhab’s Rolling Sea amongst New Statesman’s Best Books of 2020
Added on 11/11/2020
My books of the year have been richly rewarding companions. Richard J King’s Ahab’s Rolling Sea (…) is both a brilliant reading of the novel and an elegy for the wonders of the sea that we humans are destroying.
READ MOREThe Great Derangement reviewed in the Independent
Added on 11/11/2020
Novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that what lies at the heart of the climate crisis is a failure of imagination to confront a catastrophe we can’t see. He envisages that our great-grandchildren will look back at our current period as one …
READ MOREIdi Amin reviewed in The Sunday Times
Added on 09/11/2020
“Your Majesty,” wrote the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, in a telegram to the Queen at the height of his butchery in the 1970s, “the economic war which we have been fighting tooth and nail has been honourably won …
READ MOREArts & Crafts Churches featured in the Spectator
Added on 09/11/2020
A beautifully written and designed gazetteer, illustrated in colour throughout with the author’s own excellent photographs, it provides detailed information, lively anecdotes and firm opinions in equal measure.
READ MOREThe Great British Reboot featured in the Daily Mail
Added on 09/11/2020
Armed with a brutal combination of cannons and bombs, the Tempest fighter aircraft was deep inside enemy territory in Northern France, strafing airfields and attacking radar installations. Its speed and power — at low altitude …
READ MOREFake Heritage: Why We Rebuild Monuments reviewed in TLS
Added on 06/11/2020
Should Palmyra be restored? Should the Bamiyan buddhas be replaced? Should Notre-Dame’s spire be replicated? Such questions seem timeless. Why can’t Greece replace its Parthenon marbles with replicas of those in London?
READ MOREArts of Dying reviewed in the London Review of Books
Added on 05/11/2020
This book begins with a paradox: we speak incessantly of death, yet can’t say anything about it because it has no being. A subsidiary paradox has long puzzled medievalists: ‘It is hard to tell when you read only the poetry of the late 14th century …
READ MOREThe Book of Sleep extracted in the Paris Review
Added on 03/11/2020
Glowing brighter and brighter. Slowly the eyes open. Rays fall across retinas. Drowsily they roam about and, for a brief spell, memory of reality meshes with this most current impression and the space becomes both familiar and strange.
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