News and reviews

Christopher Hill reviewed in the TLS

Added on 21/03/2025

Christopher Hill was unmatched in his knowledge of seventeenth-century printed material, and avid in devouring monographs from contemporary university presses. He had a phenomenal power of concentrated thinking and intuitions that were sometimes inspired.

Burying the Enemy reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 20/03/2025

There are several dozen graves from the second world war (and some from the first) in churchyards near my village on Salisbury Plain, but all of them British or Commonwealth ones. Nor have I seen any enemy graves elsewhere, although some 4,500 Germans died on British soil during the last world war, and a far smaller number in the Great War.

The Brothers Grimm reviewed in the LRB

Added on 20/03/2025

The hyper-courtly Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror.

Michael Chaplin interviewed in the Guardian

Added on 19/03/2025

In addition to photographing the fans who flocked to Wembley for the Carabao Cup final, Orlando Gili interviewed writer, playwright and Newcastle fan Michael Chaplin about what it means to follow the Magpies.

Changing My Mind extracted in the Observer

Added on 16/03/2025

It sounds a simple business. “I changed my mind.” Subject, verb, object – a clear, clean action, without correcting or diminishing adjectives or adverbs. “No, I’m not doing that – I changed my mind” is usually an irrefutable statement.

Emile Zola reviewed in the LRB

Added on 15/03/2025

Arriving in London during the autumn of 1893, Emile Zola and his wife, Alexandrine, found themselves welcomed with the kind of pomp normally reserved for visiting heads of state. As guests of the Royal Institute of Journalists, the pair were whisked off to Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and the Greenwich Observatory and given a tour of the East End, whose slums seemed altogether less dismal to the novelist than those he had so graphically evoked in L’Assommoir.

Vanessa Bell reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/03/2025

The artist Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, the wife of Clive Bell, is enjoying the limelight this year as an exhibition of her work travels the country. Hot on its coat-tails comes Wendy Hitchmough’s beautifully illustrated new study of Bell’s life and art.

Apocalyptic Ecologies reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/03/2025

The fourteenth century was a time of ecological disasters: plagues, storms, floods, earthquakes, droughts and famines. It was also, as Shannon Gayk notes, a time of “theological and literary experimentation in English … in which writers riffed on biblical sources, turning them over, upside down, and inside out, reimagining the stories for their late medieval audience”.

Fragments Against My Ruin reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/03/2025

A man wearing a dark rollneck sweater and a long coat stands in front of a two-tone door, his brow furrowed and his beard overgrown. Staring into the camera as if for a mugshot, he holds a newspaper in front of him.

Botanical Revolutions reviewed in Art Newspaper

Added on 11/03/2025

This overview examines how plants have been represented in art since antiquity, a subject that has been overlooked to a degree. “Despite their significant material and conceptual contributions, plants have been sidelined in the commentary of art historians and critics,” says a publisher’s statement.

Who Am I to Judge featured in the Guardian

Added on 08/03/2025

Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.

Ballerina reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 08/03/2025

There are, broadly speaking, two types of artist: the explorer and the miner. The explorer keeps moving on, staking out new aesthetic or thematic terrain, while the miner keeps returning, digging deeper into the same earth each time. Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel prizewinner for literature in 2014, is an artist firmly of the second camp.