News and reviews

Madam War Criminal reviewed in the Observer

Added on 05/11/2025

In October 2002, Biljana Plavšić, biologist and former president of Republika Srpska, made history. The “Iron Lady of the Balkans”, as Madeleine Albright called her, was judged by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to be guilty of persecution – a crime against humanity. Plavšić became the first woman ever to be convicted by an international criminal tribunal.

Katherine Mansfield reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 04/11/2025

Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’.

Republic and Empire reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2025

The central theme of Republic and Empire is the imperial character of the American Revolution. The Navigation Acts Britain imposed on the American colonies to help pay for the Seven Years’ War (1756–63); the military support France and Spain gave to Washington’s Continental Army; the experience of Canada, Ireland, Jamaica and the West Indies relative to that of the American colonists; the guns, rifles and ammunition from France and the Austrian Netherlands that American ships purchased from Dutch St Eustatius; and the ramifications of chattel slavery throughout the British Empire – all of these factors affected why and how the revolution unfolded.

The White Lady reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 01/11/2025

We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is.

It Started in Damascus reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2025

When the regime of Bashar al-Assad started to topple in November 2024, news travelled fast throughout the Syrian diaspora. Activists and analysts organised eleventh-hour meetings. Some wanted to watch developments on social media. Others wanted to talk about all that had been lost in the almost fourteen years of civil war that had raged since 2011.

Nine Authentic Ghost Stories reviewed in the Daily Mail

Added on 31/10/2025

Originally published in 1886 and reprinted with an introduction by fiction fan Kirsty Logan, these deliciously dark tales have the hallmarks of classic ghost stories.

Whitewards reviewed in the TLS

Added on 31/10/2025

When Katarína Kucbelová’s fifth poetry collection, k bielej (whitewards), was published in 2022, Slovakia was reeling from one of the world’s worst per capita Covid death rates, fractured by conspiracy theories and shaken by political turmoil sparked by the war in neighbouring Ukraine.

Islamesque reviewed in the TLS

Added on 31/10/2025

There can be few architectural history books that have come to a more extraordinary conclusion than Islamesque. Its author, Diana Darke, argues that Europe’s Romanesque churches were built not by local masons, but by Arab craftsmen brought from North Africa and the Middle East.

Frida Kahlo’s month in Paris reviewed in the TLS

Added on 31/10/2025

One of the women in this pairing is world-famous, but the other proves more interesting, in this book published to accompany an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Minneapolis in 1891, Mary Reynolds moved to Paris in 1921, after her husband’s death in France shortly after the First World War.

The Fatimids reviewed in the TLS

Added on 31/10/2025

On a visit to Cairo in 1047, the Persian scholar Nasir-i Khusraw attended a feast at the court of al-Mustansir, the eighth Fatimid caliph and ruler of Egypt (1036–94). Nasir later recounted that the royal hall had been decorated with thousands of confectionery sculptures, including an ornamental orange tree with branches and leaves crafted entirely from sugar.

The Lake Poets extract in the Observer

Added on 19/10/2025

Thirty years after William Wordsworth died, the Reverend Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley walked around Grasmere chatting to the locals and seeking memories of the great poet. To Rawnsley, a late 19th-century man of letters, this must have seemed a rich seam to hack into because Wordsworth had by then been lionised as a giant of English poetry.

Storyteller reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/10/2025

Robert Louis Stevenson is chiefly remembered for the creation of the archetypal Jekyll and Hyde (1886), so strangely or perhaps not so strangely foreshadowing the crimes of Jack the Ripper, and for his tales of boyhood adventure – Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886) and Catriona (1893).