News and reviews

Art Is reviewed in Church Times

Added on 28/08/2026

Some books tell you what to think. This one teaches you how to look. This book is not a work of art theory, nor a theology textbook. It is something rarer: a book that takes the reader by the hand and asks them to slow down.

Harold reviewed in Church Times

Added on 28/08/2026

The appearance of Tom Licence’s new biography of King Harold caused a stir for casting doubt on the claim — first made by John Milton — that, far from marching from his magnificent victory at Stamford Bridge to his close defeat at Hastings, Harold and his army took the boat.

The Full English mentioned in the Guardian

Added on 25/08/2026

Lewis Bassett is a young sociologist and chef who I first encountered through his podcast, The Full English, where he thinks about the cultural meaning of, say, Delia Smith; gazpacho; whelks. This was thinking you didn’t know you needed until you heard it.

Judith S. Lewis writes in Aspects of History

Added on 25/08/2026

What was it like to have your house requisitioned during the war? To share your home with occupiers, whether Land Girls, POWs, soldiers, or spies? What compensation did families receive for the loss of their homes? And how did it all work?

The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson reviewed in the TLS

Added on 21/08/2026

All analyses end badly”, Janet Malcolm wrote in 1980. “Each ‘termination’ leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death.” The shortcomings of the so-called talking cure are many; psychoanalysis, like most forms of therapy and most psychopharmaceuticals, often fails to bring about the total healing that patients hope for.

What’s in a Name? review in the TLS

Added on 21/08/2026

Reviewing a television programme about Shakespeare’s authorship, the critic Nancy Banks-Smith wrote: “Shakespeare, like royalty, [you have] reached the stage when people celebrate your anniversary by arguing that you are a blatant fraud perpetrated on a patient people” (Guardian, April 24, 2002).

The Age of Hobsbawm reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 19/08/2026

At the start of the 21st century, Eric Hobsbawm could claim to be the most famous and most widely read historian in the world. His books were bestsellers, read by millions. His death in 2012 was front-page news in countries as far apart as India and Brazil.

The Matter of Architecture reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 18/08/2026

Terra firma is the “there’s plenty of fish in the sea” of outmoded geological idioms; the ground isn’t as solid as it used to be, and we humans are to blame, thanks to the incredible violence we have wrought upon this earth.

Harold reviewed in Aspects of History

Added on 17/08/2026

A few weeks ago I heard Tom Licence speaking on a podcast (part of the promotion of this new work, no doubt) about how King Harold’s famed feat of generalship (marching from London to Stamford Bridge and back again in under two weeks), may not have been a march after all (or at least… not entirely).

Harold reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/08/2026

Oh Harold. So near and yet so far. So close and yet no cigar. In January 1066 the world (well, England) was at his feet. Two hundred and eighty-two days later he was battle meat.

Author interview in Aspects of History

Added on 14/08/2026

That word, mission, might make you think of Robert De Niro or Jeremy Irons, perhaps a young Liam Neeson, in Jesuit robes clambering up the Iguazu Falls in deepest South America, but, forgotten and less-documented as their efforts may be, there was a Protestant expansion too, a clear, not-so-Papist will to propagate the Gospel to the world, that challenges those preconceptions.

Accidental Tyrant reviewed in the LRB

Added on 13/08/2026

North Korea is an anomaly. Its GDP per capita is at least thirty times smaller than South Korea’s, but it is also an industrialised, predominantly urban society with near total literacy and many more doctors and teachers than the other states below 150th place in global wealth rankings.