News and reviews
Vanessa Bell reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 18/06/2025
One of artist Vanessa Bell’s earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell “which I liked best, my father or my mother.” Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be “jumping around naked” in the bathroom.
READ MOREA Philosophy of Shame reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 18/06/2025
In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden.
READ MORESecond Front reviewed in the TLS
Added on 13/06/2025
The British Normandy memorial, inaugurated in 2019, overlooks Gold Beach. Whether it was necessary to build it is debatable. There was already a British memorial in Bayeux, but it suffered from the handicap of not being close to a D-Day beach.
READ MORENormandy reviewed in the TLS
Added on 13/06/2025
The British Normandy memorial, inaugurated in 2019, overlooks Gold Beach. Whether it was necessary to build it is debatable. There was already a British memorial in Bayeux, but it suffered from the handicap of not being close to a D-Day beach.
READ MOREThe Strand reviewed in the TLS
Added on 13/06/2025
This is an important book, brimful of information on what is arguably one of the most significant streets in London, the route for the capital’s expansion over many centuries. As a historical account, however, it is somewhat infuriating.
READ MOREMrs Dalloway featured in the New Statesman
Added on 11/06/2025
Everyone has cracks; we hear that’s how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted “everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work”.
READ MOREGoodbye Globalization reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 11/06/2025
After the Cold War, globalisation was hailed by politicians and business leaders as the way to create higher living standards, reduce the threat of war and spread Western-style liberal democracy through free trade.
READ MOREReading Practice reviewed in the TLS
Added on 09/06/2025
One of the great utopian promises of the internet was that it could teach you how to do anything. When we need to fix a water-damaged iPhone, cook a recipe, revive a faltering houseplant or treat a nasty blister, we turn to Google first. But that promise was only half kept.
READ MOREAwake! selected as The Idler’s Book of the Week
Added on 09/06/2025
Blake sought recovery. He strove to awaken and embolden a re-expanded imagination through the use of poetry, imagery, and piercing insights. Further, unlike many of the Romantic figures with whom he is often grouped, he did not proceed by rejecting the political and technological revolutions that so dramatically marked his era (and have continued in our own), or by appealing to lost times and distant moods, as if he were a lone, tragic visionary.
READ MORESand, Snow and Stardust reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 06/06/2025
In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year.
READ MOREHoly Men of the Electromagnetic Age reviewed in the TLS
Added on 06/06/2025
In 1924, on a rainy December day in Rome, a small crowd of doctors and journalists led by a bearded man in robes filed out of a theatre and gathered around a pit. The robed man stuffed cotton into his nose and ears, then climbed into the hole, where he was covered with soil.
READ MOREDarwin’s Savages reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 06/06/2025
It was a journey Bruce Chatwin hankered to make: to Southampton and the grave of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the exiled Argentine dictator described in the Southampton Times after his funeral in 1877 as ‘one of the most cruel, remorseless and sanguinary tyrants who ever existed on Earth’.
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