News and reviews
Vanessa Bell featured in the Guardian
Added on 31/03/2025
When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every available surface in blazing hues; or the famous phrase about their unorthodox sex lives – they “painted in circles and loved in triangles”.
READ MOREBurying the Enemy featured in the Guardian
Added on 29/03/2025
For some, tending the graves was an act of reconciliation. For others, it was about acknowledging shared losses and shared grief.
Thousands of Germans who died in Britain during the first and second world wars were laid to rest in local graveyards. British people tended these graves for decades, even laying flowers and wreaths for their former foes.
READ MORESaudi Arabia reviewed in the TLS
Added on 28/03/2025
To those of us who have lived and worked there, it is simply “the Kingdom”. On first arrival, the experience can be unsettling. There are so many clichés about Saudi Arabia that to find an actual place, inhabited by human beings with recognizably human feelings, can almost be a shock.
READ MOREHomeland reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 26/03/2025
Almost a quarter of a century on, is the US still being shaped by 9/11? Richard Beck thinks so, despite all the other shocking and pivotal events there since the 2001 attacks, from the financial crisis to the twin election victories of Donald Trump.
READ MOREAbortion reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 24/03/2025
The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been.
READ MOREAshes of Our Fathers reviewed in the TLS
Added on 21/03/2025
In different, less globally calamitous times, the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh might have registered more forcefully. In September 2023, amid the horrors of the war in Ukraine, and two weeks before Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive to capture the isolated Armenian-governed and -populated highland enclave in the west of the country, a place it had not controlled since Soviet times.
READ MOREThe Many Lives of Anne Frank reviewed in the TLS
Added on 21/03/2025
A contribution to Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, The Many Lives of Anne Frank is part biography, part history and part literary and cultural criticism.
READ MOREChristopher Hill reviewed in the TLS
Added on 21/03/2025
Christopher Hill was unmatched in his knowledge of seventeenth-century printed material, and avid in devouring monographs from contemporary university presses. He had a phenomenal power of concentrated thinking and intuitions that were sometimes inspired.
READ MOREBurying the Enemy reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 20/03/2025
There are several dozen graves from the second world war (and some from the first) in churchyards near my village on Salisbury Plain, but all of them British or Commonwealth ones. Nor have I seen any enemy graves elsewhere, although some 4,500 Germans died on British soil during the last world war, and a far smaller number in the Great War.
READ MOREThe Brothers Grimm reviewed in the LRB
Added on 20/03/2025
The hyper-courtly Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror.
READ MOREMichael Chaplin interviewed in the Guardian
Added on 19/03/2025
In addition to photographing the fans who flocked to Wembley for the Carabao Cup final, Orlando Gili interviewed writer, playwright and Newcastle fan Michael Chaplin about what it means to follow the Magpies.
READ MOREChanging My Mind extracted in the Observer
Added on 16/03/2025
It sounds a simple business. “I changed my mind.” Subject, verb, object – a clear, clean action, without correcting or diminishing adjectives or adverbs. “No, I’m not doing that – I changed my mind” is usually an irrefutable statement.
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