News and reviews

David Harvey writes in the New Statesman

Added on 23/02/2026

In November 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics. In the course of this visit she asked the assembled economists why they had not seen the financial crisis coming. Not having any immediate answers, the economists consulted and ran seminars.

Climate by Proxy reviewed in Nature

Added on 23/02/2026

“Climate defies easy definition,” writes historian Melissa Charenko in her complex yet accessible book on the scientific study of the climate during the twentieth century. This research relied on climate proxies, which fall into two types. Physical proxies include fossilized pollen, tree rings and stalagmites.

A Little History of the Earth reviewed in Nature

Added on 23/02/2026

One of the many vivid details in geographer Jamie Woodward’s brief history of Earth is palaeontologist Stephen Gould’s demonstration of the planet’s 4.5-billion-year lifespan during his lectures. Using his outstretched arm, Gould’s shoulder marks Earth’s formation, life appears at the elbow and the last millimetre of his middle fingernail represents the history of humans.

Wilkie Collins On Cornwall reviewed in the Mail on Sunday

Added on 22/02/2026

The sight of two young male friends walking across Cornwall in the summer of 1850 with knapsacks on their backs caused consternation among the locals.

‘Poor fellows!’ they said. ‘Obliged to carry all your baggage on your own backs!’ In villages, little children ran indoors to bring out their siblings.

Battle of the Big Bang reviewed in the TLS

Added on 20/02/2026

In 1964, two physicists working at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey were puzzling over the persistent static that plagued the signals picked up by a massive receiver built to detect radio waves bouncing off satellites.

Converts reviewed in the TLS

Added on 20/02/2026

Nobody likes a convert. For believers, the word carries connotations of zealotry, an implicit accusation of slackness in those with established beliefs. To the unconverted, it represents a baffling abandonment, a loss of plot and implied disapproval of unconverted friends.

The Maginot Line reviewed in the TLS

Added on 20/02/2026

Constructed to be a statement of French military strength, the Maginot Line has come to be seen instead as solid evidence of a defensive, doomed-to-defeat attitude, duly exploited by the Blitzkrieg in the summer of 1940.

Holbein reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 19/02/2026

Preaching​ before Edward VI and his council in June 1548, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, reflected that ‘in my time hath come many alterations.’ Gardiner was referring to the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries and the iconoclastic fervour of Edward’s reign, each of which represented a ‘great alteration’ of policy and sentiment.

Anton Jäger writes in the New Statesman

Added on 18/02/2026

In his 2002 memoir Interesting Times, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm offers a succinct definition of the 1900s. “Nothing is more characteristic of that century,” he notes, “than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the 20th century: political passion’.”

The Cancelled Prime Minister reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 17/02/2026

The subtitle of Walter Reid’s biography of James Ramsay MacDonald refers to ‘the extraordinary rise and tragic fall’ of Labour’s first prime minister. The rise was not especially extraordinary. In the first decades of the 20th century several people from relatively humble backgrounds – David Lloyd George and John Burns from outside MacDonald’s party, and Philip Snowden and Arthur Henderson (to give just two examples) from within it – reached the top or very near the top of British politics.

Alexandra Prokopenko writes in the Economist

Added on 16/02/2026

As Russia’s war against Ukraine enters its fifth year, the economy that sustains it has been transformed in ways that will be difficult—perhaps impossible—to reverse without another crisis.

The Long Death of Adolf Hitler reviewed in the Big Issue

Added on 07/02/2026

Around 3.30pm on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker. Minutes later, his still warm body was carried outside by loyal staffers and burned in the Reich Chancellery gardens. His physical exit from this world was swift, yet in cultural terms the Nazi dictator has taken an extraordinarily long time to die.