News and reviews

King and Country reviewed in the Daily Mail

Added on 22/10/2026

In 1938, Neville Chamberlain famously met Hitler and returned claiming that he had won ‘peace for our time’.

But, in private, the two men had taken a dim view of one another.

The Means of Prediction reviewed in LSE Review of Books

Added on 22/10/2026

Popular culture has long imagined artificial intelligence (AI) as humanity’s antagonist. From 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) through The Terminator (1984) to Ex Machina (2015), film reliably warns that the technologies we build will one day turn on us. The industry’s own luminaries have taken up the refrain.

Hyperpolitics reviewed in the LSE

Added on 20/10/2026

The rumour “that politics is dead, as [Annie] Erneaux had it, has been disproven. For now, however, it is as if our patient has awoken from a coma to a state of frenzied activity, without ever coming to terms with the symptoms” (93).

Edward Hopper featured in the Art Newspaper

Added on 20/10/2026

Around the age of 13, Edward Hopper converted the attic of the Nyack family home into a makeshift painting studio and private haven. Here he put into action his dream of becoming a painter. Though he had attempted some watercolours in the early 1890s, Hopper now began painting in oils, demonstrating a newfound artistic seriousness.

Paul Celan reviewed in the TLS

Added on 16/10/2026

Like that of Byron or Rimbaud, the life of the German Jewish poet Paul Celan lends itself to mythologizing. Born in 1920 on the eastern fringes of the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire, swept up in the Nazi Holocaust, which killed both his parents, Celan made his way to Paris after years in a Romanian labour camp, married a wealthy aristocrat …

Lucian, Volumes I and II reviewed in the TLS

Added on 16/10/2026

Lucian of Samosata was one of antiquity’s most engaging writers: inventive, fearless, absurdist, genre-busting. Born in the first half of the second century CE in a small town in what is now south-central Turkey, he pioneered a range of new literary forms, including satirical biographies of religious figures, fictional dialogues of the dead and what has been hailed as the first work of sci-fi.

Sacred Betrayal reviewed in the Jewish Chronicle

Added on 16/10/2026

Between March 1942 and the liberation of France from Nazi rule, some 80,000 French and foreign-born Jews, including 11,400 children, were deported from France to their deaths in the concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz.

97 Fights reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 13/10/2026

In 1891, in Thomas Edison’s makeshift film studio – a shack in West Orange, New Jersey – two men put on gloves and solemnly set about the serious business of battering each other senseless while Edison’s camera steadily watched. The resulting film, Men Boxing, lasted just a few seconds. There was no crowd, no purse and no title at stake; the fighters don’t even have names.

Studio Aalto featured in the Guardian

Added on 13/10/2026

In the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo propheta in patria: “No man is a prophet in his own land”.

The Barrel of a Gun reviewed in History Today

Added on 10/10/2026

Khakis, multi-coloured berets, speeches about neo-colonialism; many readers will recognise the hallmarks of Africa’s new military strongmen. Nor do you have to look far to find evidence of the cynical brutality of Sudan’s stratocracy and its rebel opponents.

Leopard in the Garden reviewed in the LRB

Added on 08/10/2026

The modern zoo is nearly two centuries old. The zoological gardens in Regent’s Park were established in 1828 by the inventor Humphry Davy and the colonial adventurer Stamford Raffles, founder of modern Singapore. It was a fitting collaboration: encompassing the globe and studying its minutiae were different aspects of the same imperial ambition.

Medea reviewed in the Observer

Added on 07/10/2026

Growing up, many young girls look up to a real or fictional idol. Although it may seem like an odd or even concerning choice, as a 14-year-old mine was Medea. Hailing from far-off Colchis, in modern-day Georgia, Medea was a sorceress of divine descent who, in Greek mythology, helped the hero Jason in his dangerous quest to retrieve the golden fleece.