News and reviews

Emile Zola reviewed in the LRB

Added on 15/03/2025

Arriving in London during the autumn of 1893, Emile Zola and his wife, Alexandrine, found themselves welcomed with the kind of pomp normally reserved for visiting heads of state. As guests of the Royal Institute of Journalists, the pair were whisked off to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and the Greenwich Observatory and given a tour of the East End, whose slums seemed altogether less dismal to the novelist than those he had so graphically evoked in L’Assommoir.

Vanessa Bell reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/03/2025

The artist Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, the wife of Clive Bell, is enjoying the limelight this year as an exhibition of her work travels the country. Hot on its coat-tails comes Wendy Hitchmough’s beautifully illustrated new study of Bell’s life and art.

Apocalyptic Ecologies reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/03/2025

The fourteenth century was a time of ecological disasters: plagues, storms, floods, earthquakes, droughts and famines. It was also, as Shannon Gayk notes, a time of “theological and literary experimentation in English … in which writers riffed on biblical sources, turning them over, upside down, and inside out, reimagining the stories for their late medieval audience”.

Fragments Against My Ruin reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/03/2025

A man wearing a dark rollneck sweater and a long coat stands in front of a two-tone door, his brow furrowed and his beard overgrown. Staring into the camera as if for a mugshot, he holds a newspaper in front of him.

Botanical Revolutions reviewed in Art Newspaper

Added on 11/03/2025

This overview examines how plants have been represented in art since antiquity, a subject that has been overlooked to a degree. “Despite their significant material and conceptual contributions, plants have been sidelined in the commentary of art historians and critics,” says a publisher’s statement.

Who Am I to Judge featured in the Guardian

Added on 08/03/2025

Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.

Ballerina reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 08/03/2025

There are, broadly speaking, two types of artist: the explorer and the miner. The explorer keeps moving on, staking out new aesthetic or thematic terrain, while the miner keeps returning, digging deeper into the same earth each time. Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel prizewinner for literature in 2014, is an artist firmly of the second camp.

You Can’t Please All reviewed in the TLS

Added on 07/03/2025

Pally with Bertrand Russell and Mick Jagger, begging to get on the roof of a house in Hanoi to shoot at the final futile waves of Operation Rolling Thunder, wiping the floor with Henry Kissinger at the Oxford Union, mistaken for Che Guevara’s bodyguard and arrested in Bolivia, nearly breaching the citadel of the US embassy in Grosvenor Square – the writer and activist Tariq Ali had, you might say, a pretty good Cold War.

The Fiery Spirits reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 06/03/2025

Connecting mass political movements with parliamentary representation is a perennial issue for the left in Britain and, indeed, elsewhere. It is correct to say that the former — the struggle beyond the Palace of Westminster — is the determining factor in political outcomes, but also true that parliamentary articulation can help shape and empower the movement, even as MPs draw strength from it.

Listen In reviewed in the Observer

Added on 02/03/2025

One hundred years ago this summer, from high above Daventry in Northamptonshire, voices began to beam into the homes of 20 million people. They came from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter – truly revolutionary technology in 1925 – which opened with a new work, Daventry Calling, by the poet Alfred Noyes.

Turner and Constable reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/03/2025

This book is billed as providing a ‘fresh’ look at its subject. It needs to, since the pairing of Turner and Constable is a hoary one, dating from their own lifetimes and repeatedly – even tediously – proposed since. To her great credit, Nicola Moorby manages never to be tedious. She orchestrates this well-worn theme with thoughtfulness, tying her analysis to close observation of the works.

Hayek vs Keynes reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 28/02/2025

Neither John Maynard Keynes nor Friedrich von Hayek wanted to see the devastation of the Great Depression or the second world war again. Both understood how economics and politics could tear societies apart.