News and reviews

The Dream Factory reviewed in the TLS

Added on 18/04/2025

In April 1576, James Burbage, a joiner turned actor, signed a lease on a half-acre patch of land in Shoreditch. The district was conveniently located outside the walls of the City of London, with its strict controls on buildings and their use. Burbage’s plan was to build a playhouse, and he named it the Theatre.

The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 16/04/2025

Tony Benn was a paradox. He was a socialist whose integrity no one questioned, as well as an inspiring, fluent, persuasive and charismatic politician. Yet his three main achievements – the Peerage Act of 1963 (which allowed him and others to renounce their peerages), his securing of a referendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market and his democratisation of the Labour Party (which opened up the election of its leaders to all party members) – did nothing to advance socialism by a millimetre, and only the first was undoubtedly a good thing.

Multitudes reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 13/04/2025

“Why do we join crowds?,” asks Dan Hancox in his book examining the crowd in its physical, social and psychological forms. Mob, horde, rabble, mass, swarm — there is no shortage of denigratory terms to describe large gatherings of humanity, whether their communal purpose is to support their local football team or to celebrate in shared carnivalesque joy at the burgeoning music festivals but particularly to demonstrate for or against an infringement on their own or others’ freedoms.

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism reviewed in Church Times

Added on 11/04/2025

One of my predecessors as General Secretary of the (then) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Bishop Henry Montgomery, proudly wrote in 1902: “These are great times and one feels the stir of an Imperial Christianity. . . Clergy are officers in an imperial army . . . full of the Imperial spirit, not merely of the empire of England but of something still greater, the empire of Christ.”

Between the Salt and the Ash reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 07/04/2025

In 2023, a young Geordie poet named Jake Morris-Campbell walked the Northumbrian coast from Lindisfarne to Durham by way of Bamburgh, Seahouses, Craster, Amble, Cresswell, Ashington, Blyth and Whitley Bay on to the Tyne (stop for a breather), before crossing the water at Shields and on to Jarrow, Boldon Colliery and Sunderland to the Wear (Wee-ah), finally veering inland to Durham where the body of Cuthbert, patron saint of the north, lies interred.

Hanna Diamond interviewed in the Guardian

Added on 06/04/2025

She was, according to US wartime counter-intelligence officer Lt Paul Jensen, “our No 1 contact in French Morocco”, supporting the allied mission “at great risk to her own life – and I mean that literally. We would have been quite helpless without her.”

Humans in Shackles reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/04/2025

In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 enslaved people disembarked. Of the roughly 10.7 million people who survived the passage across the Atlantic in the nearly four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, nearly 5 million were sent to Brazil – almost five times as many as to Jamaica and more than fourteen times as many as to North America.

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism reviewed in History Today

Added on 04/04/2025

The morning after Edward VII was crowned King of Great Britain and Emperor of India in Westminster Abbey, Canon Welldon treated the colonial troops who had attended the ceremony to a valedictory sermon. An Old Etonian and a former headmaster of Harrow who had until recently been bishop of Calcutta, Welldon was the embodiment of upper-class and imperial purpose.

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/04/2025

More than 300 years before Apollo 11, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a science-fiction fantasy, Somnium, in which a mother and son journey to the Moon and describe the appearance of the Earth from there, complete with observed “phases” akin to the Moon’s own.

Turner and Constable reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/04/2025

Frank Auerbach was right: “There isn’t a Turner that doesn’t somehow fly and there isn’t a Constable that doesn’t burrow.” J. M. W. Turner appears to have seen the world from midair: as viewers of his paintings, we can feel suspended in vortices of swirling wind, snow or smoke.

Scholars and Their Kin reviewed in History Today

Added on 04/04/2025

In an inexplicable moment of synchronicity, this book was brought to my attention as I was drafting an abstract for a conference about my father. A year ago, the idea that I would be developing a scholarly talk about my dad would have been unthinkable.

As I Please … reviewed in the Tribune

Added on 03/04/2025

S0metimes you don’t know what you’ve got till you take another look in the store cupboard. A new collection of Martin Rowson’s writings for Tribune opens up a treasure trove of caustically acerbic railings against the wrongs of the world, especially targeting the ‘craven, incompetent, cruel and callous clowns that lead us’.