News and reviews
Revolutions reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/04/2026
Of the many books published about revolutions, some begin in ancient times and move forward, while others are the work of multiple contributors who explore a common theme. The majority, though, are individual works that do not look back further than the seventeenth century.
READ MOREThe Medieval Guide to Healthy Living extract in Church Times
Added on 17/04/2026
Although it is often claimed that religion was the main force preventing the advancement of medical knowledge and the practice of proper medicine in the Middle Ages, the Church actually played an important part in educating the laity — and perhaps especially the illiterate — about their bodies.
READ MORERepetition reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/04/2026
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud observed: The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it … He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.
READ MOREAmedeo Modigliani feature and author interview in Art Newspaper
Added on 14/04/2026
After almost 30 years, several legal battles and a few death threats, Marc Restellini’s catalogue raisonné of Amedeo Modigliani’s oil paintings is finally published today (14 April) by the art historian and curator’s Institut Restellini, distributed by Yale University Press.
READ MOREZsuzsanna Szelényi writes in the Guardian
Added on 13/04/2026
“Europe! Europe! Europe!” That’s what tens of thousands of us chanted on the banks of the Danube on Sunday as Péter Magyar addressed the jubilant crowd. On a record turnout of 77%, Hungarians have delivered a political earthquake, giving Magyar’s Tisza party the first real opportunity in 16 years to dismantle the system built by Viktor Orbán.
READ MOREPortmeirion reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 11/04/2026
The only answer to the question ‘What connects Brian Epstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Portofino and Stevenage?’ is ‘Portmeirion’, a conceptualised village on the north Wales coast. You could call it a folly, except it is living, not dead; and it exerts a lasting fascination.
READ MORELove is Strong as Death reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 11/04/2026
In the early years of the 20th century, a young philosopher named Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) set himself the task of revitalising German Jewry – of bringing German Jews in from what he saw as the periphery of assimilation to the centre of a living faith.
READ MOREInterview with Daria Santini in Aspects of History
Added on 08/04/2026
The author talks through her background in German literature, her inclination towards cultural history and possible biographies of 20th-century women.
READ MOREDorothea Tanning reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 08/04/2026
I received this book for review on the same day that Dorothea Tanning was making headlines in the auction world, breaking records with the sale at Christie’s of a tiny but key early work for more than £4 million.
READ MOREManchester Unspun mention on BBC News
Added on 07/04/2026
It is the age-old debate – where is England’s second city?
This hotly-contested question over the unofficial title has fiercely divided the Brummies and Mancunians for decades.
READ MOREChapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal featured on BBC News
Added on 04/04/2026
In mid-20th Century Bengal in eastern India, some of the biggest female stars on stage were actually men.
Foremost among them was Chapal Bhaduri – better known as Chapal Rani – the reigning “queen” of jatra, a travelling theatre tradition that once drew vast, fervent crowds.
READ MOREHow to Read Hegel Now reviewed in the TLS
Added on 03/04/2026
In setting out to make the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) comprehensible to a modern audience in her new book, How to Read Hegel Now, Shannon Hoff faces an enormous challenge.
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