News and reviews

J.–K. Huysmans reviewed in the TLS

Added on 28/02/2025

When Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans published his novel À rebours in 1884, he was still a part-time author. By day, the thirty-six-year-old Parisian was a civil servant. At night he wrote, visited his long-suffering lover and attended salons with Émile Zola, his literary mentor.

Christopher Hill reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 28/02/2025

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming historian Christopher Hill.

Christopher Hill reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 28/02/2025

When I was studying for my A-Level History exams, I sometimes used to pop into Foyle’s bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road to browse the voluminous History shelves, and on one of my visits I came across The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 by Christopher Hill, published in 1961.

Maria Theresa reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 26/02/2025

The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, the first English biography of the Empress Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan – had little in common except dynasty, geography and Catholicism.

Maria Theresa featured in Tatler

Added on 24/02/2025

A ruthless ruler and opponent, devoted wife and mother to sixteen children, Maria Theresa’s forty year rule over her European territories is nothing if not miraculous.

Charles Hecker writes in the Spectator

Added on 22/02/2025

It didn’t take long for preliminary discussions between the US and Russia on Ukraine to morph into something dramatically more ambitious. As negotiators left talks in Riyadh this week, both sides signalled their intent to reach agreement not only Ukraine, but also on economic and geopolitical cooperation.

Two Sisters reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 21/02/2025

Why did a stranger “stand up to evil” to save her? The Holocaust survivor Huguette Müller began pondering that question in the winter of 1943 as a 15-year-old German-Jewish refugee in Nazi-occupied France. While she and her sister, Marion, were attempting to flee, Huguette slipped on the ice and injured her leg so severely that the girls were forced to stay in the small Alpine village of Val d’Isère.

Cross Purposes reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 17/02/2025

What happens to our liberal democracy if American Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends?” Jonathan Rauch asks in the opening pages of Cross Purposes. “The alarming answer is that the crisis for Christianity has turned out to be a crisis for democracy.”

The Art of Medieval Falconry reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/02/2025

The practice of hunting with birds has existed in Eurasia for at least 4,000 years. Probably originating in the East, it spread westwards, reaching its apogee in western Europe during the Middle Ages.

Archimedes reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/02/2025

Nicholas Nicastro – academic, novelist and film critic – offers a lively biography of Archimedes, the third-century BCE inventor and mathematician from Sicily. Reliable evidence for his life is sparse, and this has helped, as Nicastro shows, to promote his legend.

Vatican Spies reviewed in Church Times

Added on 14/02/2025

In preparing my first visit to Moscow, when was working for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rodric Braithwaite, then British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, briefed me while in London. He recommended that I read John Hands’s novel Perestroika Christi.

Two Sisters reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/02/2025

In 2019, ninety-one-year-old Huguette Müller was hit by a car in San Francisco, breaking her leg. Soon after, her nephew and his wife went to visit her. Though profoundly deaf, Huguette had a story to tell. It involved another accident, another broken leg, this time in 1943, when she was a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl on the run from the Germans in what was then the remote Alpine village of Val d’Isère.