News and reviews

How to Think Impossibly reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/01/2025

Like many academics who write about philosophy or religion, I get a lot of emails from people keen to share their life stories, spiritual insights and cosmological theories. Now and then a handwritten letter arrives: most recently, on lined yellow paper with a fetching picture of pink unicorns sellotaped to the top.

Nick Bano writes in the Guardian

Added on 17/01/2025

Last month, I was working with a young homeless family on England’s south coast. The local council had found them a privately rented flat with an agreed rent, and provided a “landlord incentive” payment of £1,500. But, when the council emailed the landlord to confirm the arrangements, he replied to say that he was increasing the rent by £100 a month because “the market is moving in that direction”.

You Can’t Please All reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 16/01/2025

Having thoroughly enjoyed Tariq Ali’s earlier autobiographical book, Street Fighting Years, and having more than appreciated many other works such as his widely read and timely The Clash Of Fundamentalisms, it’s nice to report that this latest momentous tome was in no way a disappointment.

Feeling at Home reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 15/01/2025

There is a well-worn acceptance today that we are in the midst of a terrible housing crisis. News of unaffordable rents, growing rates of homelessness and poor-quality properties stalks the headlines. If you’re under 40 with dreams of home ownership, you can probably forget about it. But what if the UK’s want of adequate, affordable housing is actually just the way things are, and perhaps have always been?

Adrienne Buller writes in the Guardian

Added on 15/01/2025

Last week, as flames began tearing through greater Los Angeles, claiming multiple lives and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate, JP Morgan became the sixth major US bank to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) since the start of December.

Multitudes reviewed in the Observer

Added on 12/01/2025

At about 4pm, the riot police closed in, blocking exits from Parliament Square. After a heart-catching winter sunset, temperatures plummeted towards freezing and Dan Hancox was not alone in wanting to go home. The police had other ideas. “With their black snoods up and their thick plastic visors down,” he recalls, “the postmodern storm troopers of the Metropolitan police’s Territorial Support Group were unrelenting and unmoved.”

The Monastic World reviewed in the TLS

Added on 10/01/2025

Do we need another history of medieval monasticism? Across the Christian world in the Middle Ages, monasteries were central to the expression of religious devotion; they were, as Andrew Jotischky writes in The Monastic World, “the engine rooms of medieval society”. But the topic is well served by several existing studies for general readers, while the specialist can turn to the Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West (2020). What new perspectives can be brought to this much-explored institution?

Eufrasia Burlamacchi reviewed in the Art Newspaper

Added on 08/01/2025

The latest volume in the Illuminating Women Artists series focuses on the illuminated manuscripts of Sister Eufrasia (1478-1548), arguing that her contact with the High Renaissance beyond the walls of her Tuscan convent is revealed through her work.

Islamesque review in the Guardian

Added on 08/01/2025

From Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved capitals from a Roman temple and relics of St John the Baptist transferred from the church it replaced.

Vatican Spies reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 05/01/2025

Popes used to control vast areas of Italy – the so-called “papal states”. But when the unification of Italy was finally completed after the capture of Rome in 1870, only about 120 acres of central Rome were left in papal possession. Popes railed against the Italian state until the Lateran Pacts were signed with Benito Mussolini in 1929, when each side recognised the other and the theocratic Vatican City was created.

On Close Reading reviewed in the TLS

Added on 03/01/2025

One of my school students, Sam, comes to my Monday English clinic to work on his close reading. He expresses frustration at the process, which seems unnecessarily mysterious to him. He knows that there is some correspondence between the details he might observe in a given passage and the quality of the analysis he produces. If I could give him a step-by-step guide to how to do it, he says – a list of things to look for – then maybe he could get better at it.

The Worlds of Victor Sassoon reviewed in History Today

Added on 01/01/2025

We are sometimes inclined to compare our own imperfect times with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century: global elites wielding extraordinary political and economic power, a yawning gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else, cities plagued with shocking inequalities.