News and reviews
Ghosts, Trolls and the Hidden People reviewed in the TLS
Added on 20/06/2025
Iceland before the twentieth century was by all accounts a gloomy place. The turf and driftwood houses in which most Icelanders lived were stuffy and largely windowless; the oil lamps that illuminated them during the long dark winters too weak to light whole rooms. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that a belief in the supernatural flourished.
READ MOREAmazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact reviewed in Nature
Added on 20/06/2025
Astronomers observed the first confirmed exoplanet in 1992. Some 5,900 are now known, in about 4,500 planetary systems, with around 1,000 containing several planets, according to NASA. No life has been detected yet, showing just “how rare our planet Earth still is” and how “the imagination imbued within science fiction can only carry us so far”, notes science journalist Keith Cooper.
READ MOREWho’s a Good Dog? featured in the Observer
Added on 20/06/2025
All I ever wanted was a pet. Many pets, ideally. As a young child, I was permitted only hamsters and goldfish, and aged eight, around the turn of the millennium, I wept to my mother about the Sony Aibo, fearing that the robot dog would make real ones redundant.
READ MOREVanessa Bell reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 18/06/2025
One of artist Vanessa Bell’s earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell “which I liked best, my father or my mother.” Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be “jumping around naked” in the bathroom.
READ MOREA Philosophy of Shame reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 18/06/2025
In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden.
READ MORESecond Front reviewed in the TLS
Added on 13/06/2025
The British Normandy memorial, inaugurated in 2019, overlooks Gold Beach. Whether it was necessary to build it is debatable. There was already a British memorial in Bayeux, but it suffered from the handicap of not being close to a D-Day beach.
READ MORENormandy reviewed in the TLS
Added on 13/06/2025
The British Normandy memorial, inaugurated in 2019, overlooks Gold Beach. Whether it was necessary to build it is debatable. There was already a British memorial in Bayeux, but it suffered from the handicap of not being close to a D-Day beach.
READ MOREThe Strand reviewed in the TLS
Added on 13/06/2025
This is an important book, brimful of information on what is arguably one of the most significant streets in London, the route for the capital’s expansion over many centuries. As a historical account, however, it is somewhat infuriating.
READ MOREMrs Dalloway featured in the New Statesman
Added on 11/06/2025
Everyone has cracks; we hear that’s how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted “everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work”.
READ MOREGoodbye Globalization reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 11/06/2025
After the Cold War, globalisation was hailed by politicians and business leaders as the way to create higher living standards, reduce the threat of war and spread Western-style liberal democracy through free trade.
READ MOREReading Practice reviewed in the TLS
Added on 09/06/2025
One of the great utopian promises of the internet was that it could teach you how to do anything. When we need to fix a water-damaged iPhone, cook a recipe, revive a faltering houseplant or treat a nasty blister, we turn to Google first. But that promise was only half kept.
READ MOREAwake! selected as The Idler’s Book of the Week
Added on 09/06/2025
Blake sought recovery. He strove to awaken and embolden a re-expanded imagination through the use of poetry, imagery, and piercing insights. Further, unlike many of the Romantic figures with whom he is often grouped, he did not proceed by rejecting the political and technological revolutions that so dramatically marked his era (and have continued in our own), or by appealing to lost times and distant moods, as if he were a lone, tragic visionary.
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