News and reviews

Phil Tinline writes in the New Statesman

Added on 13/08/2025

Last year, amid the riots that followed the Southport murders, the great sage Elon Musk prophesied that civil war in Britain was “inevitable”. So far, he’s been proved wrong, but then prophets can claim they’re just not correct yet. A year on, such talk has surged.

Émile Zola reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

The early reviews of Émile Zola’s twenty- volume “natural and social history” of the Rougon-Macquart family during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, published between 1871 and 1893, bristled with words such as “vulgar”, “indecent” and “coarse”. Henry James decried “the singular foulness of his imagination” and Anatole France declared that no writer had ever “raised such a heap of filth”.

Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

Between the spring of 1936 and February 1939, an unassuming pair of mews houses at 170–2 Warwick Road, in West Kensington, London, became the home of England’s only French art school, the Amédée Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts.

The Holy Innocents reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

Miguel Delibes worked as a journalist and novelist throughout Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). He was forced to resign as editor of the Valladolid daily newspaper El norte de Castilla in 1963. The authorities detested his journalistic campaigns against rural poverty. In 1981, with Spain now a democracy, he poured decades of experience and anger into The Holy Innocents, an intense novel set twenty years earlier.

Small Earthquakes reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

Growing up in south London, Shafik Meghji was transported to South America by books and comics. Now, years later in Buenos Aires, it feels as if he’s back home, what with the weather, “the English-language Buenos Aires Herald on the newsstands, a shuttered Harrods store on the main shopping strip, the nearby Richmond café”.

The New Politics of Poland featured in the Guardian

Added on 05/08/2025

We were travelling across Poland by train the day after the country’s sensational parliamentary elections in autumn 2023. When news of the results came through, passengers in our compartment fell into each other’s arms, rejoicing as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders.

Ambigrammia featured in the Guardian

Added on 04/08/2025

The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It reviewed in Church Times

Added on 01/08/2025

This book is accessible, interesting, well-priced, and puzzling. As Professor Alec Ryrie acknowledges frankly, both in the book itself and in an excellent Church Times podcast (4 July 2025), he is straying well outside his specialist area of Reformation history by offering a unique take on post-war British culture.

Horace reviewed in the TLS

Added on 01/08/2025

Poet on a Volcano might seem a strange choice of title for the biography of a poet whose Odes were described by George Meredith as “the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants” or “gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape”.

Abortion reviewed in the TLS

Added on 01/08/2025

Birth rates are falling in countries across the world, including the US and the UK, as fewer women are willing to raise the number of children their leaders believe are needed to sustain society’s economic growth, demographic stability, even national identity.

Blind Corners reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/08/2025

Michael Collins begins Blind Corners, a book of essays on photography, with a careful study of a picture most people wouldn’t look at twice. It is a group photo of about one hundred people in a small town in Wales in 1953. Collins describes how he found a negative of the image in a moribund photo studio and restored and printed it with the aid of a high-definition scanner.

Type Designers of the Twentieth Century reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/08/2025

Publishing used to be a dirty business. I’m talking not only about the ink-stained fingers of disreputable writers, but also about the filthy hands of those who actually put the words on the page: the devils and cutters who worked with metal type.