News and reviews

Where the Earth Meets the Sky reviewed in the Mail on Sunday

Added on 03/05/2026

Picture the scene – you’re cross-country skiing across an icy snowscape: just you, the frozen sea and a ‘group of tobogganing Adelie penguins’. As you pass, they waddle over, curious to see what you are doing. Deciding that you’re probably all right, they continue tobogganing on their bellies alongside you as you ski back to your camp.

Decoding the Hand reviewed in the TLS

Added on 01/05/2026

During the occult revival of the nineteenth century, hundreds of palm-readers promised thousands of clients insights into their personalities and futures.

Travels Through the Spanish Civil War reviewed in the TLS

Added on 01/05/2026

Nick Lloyd, who runs tours on the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) in Barcelona, confesses that new volumes on the war are ubiquitous, and that it features in the Spanish press every day. Writing a genuinely engrossing book on the subject, as he has, is therefore no mean feat.

Nuclear Weapons reviewed in the TLS

Added on 01/05/2026

On the morning of October 30, 1961, scientists at Kew Observatory in southwest London detected an unusual air pressure wave. Its spokesman told The Times that it was “the largest such recording I have ever known”.

A Better Death reviewed in Church Times

Added on 01/05/2026

Side by side these two books appear counter-intuitive. The defender of legalised assisted dying is a well-known Jewish rabbi, whereas its strident adversary is a secular philosopher.

Converts reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 26/04/2026

One of the most common assumptions within the social science is that the more that societies grow, develop and industrialise the less religious and the more secular they will be. And in the initial decades of, say, the western industrialised nations there was a fair amount of evidence to support this as an overall thesis.

Murky Water reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 26/04/2026

Murky Water is a meticulously researched analysis of the state of the water industry in England and Wales, and outlines possible ways forward.

Archbishop, Chancellor, Kingmaker reviewed in Church Times

Added on 24/04/2026

Bishops come and go, “like snow upon the desert’s dusty face”, leaving little behind. Dunstans, Beckets, Cranmers, and Lauds are few and far between. This is also true of the later Middle Ages, when few but historians can think of a name, apart from the founders of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

Ways of Telling reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 24/04/2026

In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text.

Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India reviewed in the LRB

Added on 23/04/2026

Being underestimated was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. Her earliest talent was for invisibility. To the men who surrounded her father, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she was a gloomy, awkward girl.

Ways of Telling reviewed in the Tablet

Added on 22/04/2026

Xandra Bingley’s first collection of short stories, Ways of Telling, is written in a distinctive style. It presents a series of memorable vignettes that feature workaday concerns, interior monologues and a jubilant disregard for the norms of standard punctuation.

Manchester Must Dance reviewed in the Mirror

Added on 18/04/2026

When Mike Pickering became resident DJ at the Hacienda in Manchester it was an arts venue where people often sat around listening to poetry. But he helped turn it into a cathedral of the acid house movement, packed to its black and yellow pillars with people raving, covered in sweat, with eyes like saucers.