News and reviews
The Return of the Housewife reviewed in the Morning Star
Added on 03/04/2025
Emma Casey’s book, The Return of the Housewife, exposes yet another example of how social media is being used to misinform and manipulate. A reader in sociology at the University of York, Casey strips bare TikTok, Instagram, other digital sources flooded with images of “cleanfluencers” — women cleaning, tidying, putting things right, and linked to the concept of a life of love, contentment, self-care and positive thinking.
READ MORENormandy reviewed in the LRB
Added on 03/04/2025
In June 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops.
READ MOREJosephine Baker’s Secret War reviewed in Literary Review
Added on 03/04/2025
Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the time, however, it just looked like a heady cocktail of comedy, exoticism and sex.
READ MOREThe Most Dangerous Man in Britain? reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 03/04/2025
Among the most striking things about Tony Benn was his friendship with Enoch Powell. They entered the House together in 1950 and became regular presenters on The Week in Westminster before falling out over ‘rivers of blood’ and then making up. For Benn, politicians were ‘weathercocks’ or ‘signposts’, and Powell, like himself, was the latter.
READ MOREIslamesque reviewed in Literary Review
Added on 31/03/2025
Few architectural styles are as familiar to European eyes as the Romanesque. Although there are many different regional variations, you are never very far from an identifiably Romanesque building, no matter where you live. Most of us can probably pick out the essential characteristics: rounded arches, massive walls and so on – all things that we associate with the legacy of Rome. But is it really as ‘European’ as it seems?
READ MOREVanessa Bell featured in the Guardian
Added on 31/03/2025
When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every available surface in blazing hues; or the famous phrase about their unorthodox sex lives – they “painted in circles and loved in triangles”.
READ MOREBurying the Enemy featured in the Guardian
Added on 29/03/2025
For some, tending the graves was an act of reconciliation. For others, it was about acknowledging shared losses and shared grief.
Thousands of Germans who died in Britain during the first and second world wars were laid to rest in local graveyards. British people tended these graves for decades, even laying flowers and wreaths for their former foes.
READ MORESaudi Arabia reviewed in the TLS
Added on 28/03/2025
To those of us who have lived and worked there, it is simply “the Kingdom”. On first arrival, the experience can be unsettling. There are so many clichés about Saudi Arabia that to find an actual place, inhabited by human beings with recognizably human feelings, can almost be a shock.
READ MOREHomeland reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 26/03/2025
Almost a quarter of a century on, is the US still being shaped by 9/11? Richard Beck thinks so, despite all the other shocking and pivotal events there since the 2001 attacks, from the financial crisis to the twin election victories of Donald Trump.
READ MOREAbortion reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 24/03/2025
The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been.
READ MOREAshes of Our Fathers reviewed in the TLS
Added on 21/03/2025
In different, less globally calamitous times, the fall of Nagorno-Karabakh might have registered more forcefully. In September 2023, amid the horrors of the war in Ukraine, and two weeks before Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, Azerbaijan launched a lightning offensive to capture the isolated Armenian-governed and -populated highland enclave in the west of the country, a place it had not controlled since Soviet times.
READ MOREThe Many Lives of Anne Frank reviewed in the TLS
Added on 21/03/2025
A contribution to Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, The Many Lives of Anne Frank is part biography, part history and part literary and cultural criticism.
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