News and reviews

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.

From Small Talk to Microaggression reviewed in Nature

Added on 14/02/2025

As a doctoral student switching from Buddhist studies to social sciences, Michael Lempert pored over an interaction he had filmed of two Tibetan Buddhist monks “wrangling in speech and gesture” over philosophical points. He studied the minute-long video for nearly four months, sometimes muting the sound or watching it in fast forward.

Collective Body reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/02/2025

In the standard historical narrative of early Soviet art, Joseph Stalin repressed the thrilling avant-garde experiments of the 1920s and replaced them with Socialist Realism. Declared official in 1934, this doctrine produced retrograde propaganda devoid of artistic merit, motivated primarily by orders from above.

Eating and Being reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/02/2025

Belly and brain, intestines and intellect: western thought insistently distinguishes the physical from the mental, even as it knows them to be related. Steven Shapin’s new book, Eating and Being ranges from Socrates to slow food, by way of Plutarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare and the American home economics movement, as it traces significant shifts and surprising continuities in writings about diet, health and the good life.

Listen In reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 14/02/2025

Is it necessary to have the window open when listening to the new device?’ asked Edith Davidson, the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1923, referring to the latest fashionable contraption, the wireless. We might laugh – but it does take time for the older generation to catch up with new technology.

Ian Garner writes in the New Statesman

Added on 13/02/2025

The halls of power in Washington and Moscow are buzzing with talk of great power politics and the end of the war against Ukraine. On paper, three years of war have brought little benefit to Vladimir Putin. In exchange for hundreds of thousands of casualties and an economy on the brink, Russia now possesses a chunk of territory in the east of Ukraine.

Creator of Nightmares reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 07/02/2025

In December 1936, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition featured everything from Arcimboldo’s mannerist profile “Summer” (1563) to Disney animation, the “art of children” and the “art of the insane” (according to official diagnoses, at least).

Waiting for Robots reviewed in Nature

Added on 07/02/2025

US founding father Thomas Jefferson used dumbwaiters — small lifts that carry meals — during his extravagant dinners. There seemed to be no human intervention, but the lifts were operated by enslaved basement staff. As sociologist Antonio Casilli acutely observes, today too, artificial-intelligence systems are made to seem automated, often by overlooked and underpaid workers.

Vatican Spies reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 07/02/2025

Since it became independent in 1929, Vatican City has been the world’s smallest state. Every evening the gates close, leaving behind only 500 permanent residents. I once spent a week behind the walls as a guest in the Santa Marta hostel where the Pope lives; at night the deserted courtyards are thrillingly spooky.

Listen In reviewed in the Daily Mail

Added on 07/02/2025

When the BBC was founded in 1922 it was not completely clear what it was for. ‘If there is any news’, explained an early edition of the Radio Times helpfully, ‘it will be broadcast at 9pm’.

Humans in Shackles reviewed in the LSE Review of Books

Added on 06/02/2025

At the close of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eponymous revenant representing the deepest traumas of slavery’s violence has finally left the house she haunted. After a while, even her recurring footprints are forgotten: “by and by all trace is gone”. She is not simply forgotten but “disremembered and unaccounted for”.