News and reviews

Heaven Does Not Block All Roads chosen as one of BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year

Added on 20/11/2025

The Forrest Gump of Asia? Not quite – but the life of Huang Chin-tao, as explored in Anna Beth Keim’s Heaven Does Not Block All Roads (Hurst), reflects many of the turning points in the modern history of one of the most controversial places on the continent: Taiwan.

The Impossible Bomb chosen as one of BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year

Added on 20/11/2025

A host of Second World War anniversaries this year highlighted the enormous part played in that conflict by new and ever more destructive technologies. Gareth Williams’ The Impossible Bomb (Yale University Press) opened my eyes to the role of British science in the development of nuclear weapons.

Shahzia Sikander reviewed in the Art Newspaper

Added on 18/11/2025

Art in Pakistan, like its culture and language, has never quite fit the nation state that now contains it. Instead, it arises from the visual traditions of the Indian subcontinent and the Islamic world, passed through the refining fire of global modernism and the productive alienation of political trauma.

Converts reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/11/2025

Religious conversions do not, for the most part, make for good anecdotes. An exception can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy, which describes the author’s father Greg’s road to Damascus experience in a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, where he watched The Exorcist 72 times

Modernism reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/11/2025

One of the difficulties of talking about modernism is grasping that will-o’-the-wisp, the modern. How can cultural innovations be the latest thing when they’re always, by definition, becoming obsolete? In what sense is a set of century-old artistic experiments still modern?

Arthur Schopenhauer reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 13/11/2025

According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), people prefer reading books about great thinkers rather than by the thinkers themselves because ‘like is attracted to like and the shallow, tasteless gossip of a contemporary pinhead is more agreeable and convenient to them than the thoughts of great minds’.

It Started in Damascus reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 11/11/2025

Rime Allaf takes the long view of Syria’s descent into hell. Her story begins with President Hafez al Assad, the architect of the socialist Baathist dictatorship that, from 1970 to 2000, immiserated and impoverished an entire nation before his son and successor Bashar utterly destroyed it.

A Historian in Gaza featured in the Guardian

Added on 11/11/2025

A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict.

Tradecraft reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 10/11/2025

Suppose you are an aid worker, or a journalist, or a lawyer of some kind, whose work has left you with outstanding expertise in some far-flung demimonde. One day you get a message saying that David Cornwell – you might know him by the name John le Carré – is writing a book set in your part of the world. He needs an expert to help him get the fine detail right. Can he take you out for lunch?

Tradecraft mentioned in the Spectator

Added on 07/11/2025

When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his papers, he got more than he could ever have bargained for. Le Carré not only responded with enthusiasm, explaining that ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine’, but also sent along 85 boxes of neatly arranged papers and memorabilia.

Tattoos reviewed in the LRB

Added on 06/11/2025

I didn’t plan my first tattoo. A few weeks after my mother died, I was in Mexico City in a bar owned by a female mezcal maker with whom I was having an ill-advised fling. There were only a few people there, including the tattoo artist from the studio upstairs. He had his kit with him, and as the evening wore on, and the mezcal continued to flow, people began inking ‘Oaxaca’ on one another.

Up in the Air reviewed/Book of the Day in the New Statesman

Added on 05/11/2025

There are few, if any, forms of dwelling so thick with ideological, political and aesthetic baggage as the high-rise block. For the political right, the usual story, firmly set with the publication of Alice Coleman’s eviscerating book Utopia on Trial in 1985, is one of abject failure.