News and reviews
Charles Hecker writes in the Spectator
Added on 11/12/2024
Carlsberg, the brewing giant whose presence in Russia transformed that country’s beverage market, has left. What remains is the lingering residue of a boozy party that peaked too soon, ended in a brawl and left many questions dangling.
READ MOREAs I Please reviewed in the Morning Star
Added on 10/12/2024
One of the most celebrated political cartoonists of our age, Martin Rowson has a decades-long written record of equally skilful takedowns of the world’s many hypocrisies and hypocrites, proving to the detractors that cartoonists can write. Shock, horror!
READ MOREWalking in the Dark reviewed in the TLS
Added on 06/12/2024
As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier terms for the psychological effects of such an existence, “double consciousness” and “the veil”, and foreshadowed the findings (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who considered that the Black brain might be scrambled into psychosis by racism.
READ MORECode Name Puritan reviewed in the TLS
Added on 06/12/2024
Norman Holmes Pearson was a familiar mid-twentieth-century academic: a popular teacher, active committee member and organizer of conferences who never quite finished his major book. He spent his life in the Yale English department, and collected rare books and manuscripts, while fostering relationships with poets, colleagues and students at home and abroad. Born into New England’s upper-middle class, he married into the wealthy Winchester rifle family. When Greg Barnhisel began this biography, a colleague asked: “Why would you want to write about him?”
READ MOREOn James Baldwin reviewed in the TLS
Added on 06/12/2024
As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier terms for the psychological effects of such an existence, “double consciousness” and “the veil”, and foreshadowed the findings (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who considered that the Black brain might be scrambled into psychosis by racism.
READ MORERobert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 01/12/2024
It is almost obligatory for a review of a book about Robert Hooke to characterise him as ‘overlooked’ or even ‘forgotten’, and to complain of his eclipse by Newton. The most melodramatic authors will add the story – entirely spurious – that Newton ordered the destruction of Hooke’s portrait upon assuming the presidency of the Royal Society in 1703. In fact, Hooke has never been forgotten.
READ MOREAs I Please and Other Writings 1986–2024 reviewed in the Independent
Added on 01/12/2024
Martin Rowson is one of Britain’s best-known satirical cartoonists. He is also a writer and his essays and columns – including for Tribune, the Guardian and the Independent – are collected in As I Please and Other Writings 1986-2024.
READ MOREVatican Spies reviewed in the Independent
Added on 01/12/2024
Espionage in the Vatican goes back to Pope Pius V in the late 16th century and continues up to the present day. In his candid, wide-ranging study, Yvonnick Denoël, a French historian who has written on the CIA, Mossad and spying in the 20th century, draws on freshly released foreign service archives for Vatican Spies: From the Second World War to Pope Francis, an interesting study translated from the French by Alan McKay.
READ MOREBook Curses reviewed in the TLS
Added on 29/11/2024
Medieval manuscripts are full of warnings to would-be miscreants, but, as Eleanor Baker’s book makes clear, curses meant to protect the written word are not an invention of the Middle Ages. A temple dedicated to the sun god Shamash by Yahdun-Lim, king of the city-state of Mari, in what is now Syria, between 1820 and 1796 BCE, wishes death and devastation on any who might defile the temple or mar its inscriptions, and even on their descendants.
READ MOREWhere to start with: Hanif Kureishi feature in the Guardian
Added on 25/11/2024
Two years ago, on Boxing Day 2022, novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi suffered a fall in Rome that left him paralysed. Since then, with the help of family members, he has been recounting his devastating experience of “becoming divorced from [himself]” on Substack and in a memoir, Shattered, published earlier this year.
READ MOREIgnorance and Bliss reviewed in the Observer
Added on 24/11/2024
This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided – and there is a narrative, cunningly sustained within what seems a relaxed discursiveness – takes careful aim and at the end hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.
READ MOREPlantation Goods reviewed in the TLS
Added on 22/11/2024
In 1854 the fortunes of North Brookfield, Massachusetts were improving. A Congregational minister welcomed the fact, but worried that “not one dollar in fifty” in the shoe-manufacturing town “passes through our hands that is not probably derived” from “Southern slavery”.
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