News and reviews

Secrets of a Suitcase reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2024

In September 2004, Pauline Terreehorst, then director of the Amsterdam Fashion Institute, spotted a vintage Gucci suitcase coming up for auction as part of a job lot. Having long coveted such an elegant piece of luggage, she put in what turned out to be the winning bid. The suitcase came with, in her words, ‘a whole cabinet of curiosities’: dresses, buttons, lace, a fur stole and riding jackets.

The Abiy Project reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2024

Building a state takes decades of hard labour. Destroying one can be done virtually overnight. In September 2018, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, flew to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to sign a tripartite pact with Isaias Afwerki and Mohamed Abdullahi (known as ‘Farmaajo’), presidents of Eritrea and Somalia respectively.

The Medieval Scriptorium reviewed in the TLS

Added on 25/10/2024

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making books in the Middle Ages is a highly readable account of developments in book production in western Europe during the Middle Ages, surveying and contextualizing many of its best-known and most significant treasures while casting interesting light on the circumstances of their production.

Streetscapes reviewed in Country Life

Added on 20/10/2024

Ptolemy Dean’s new book, ‘Streetscapes: Navigating Historic English Towns’. examines the streetscapes of our historic towns and marvels at what we can easily take for granted. Its author encourages us to recognise their importance and considers what we can learn from them.

The Mack reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 20/10/2024

On 23 May 2014, a fire broke out in the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, destroying its library. The loss to the Mack, as it’s generally known, Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world.

Analog Superpowers featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

Shortly before the First World War, two British inventors developed an analogue computer that enabled battleships to fire with unprecedented accuracy. Their breakthrough was promptly pirated by the British and US navies and the ensuing lawsuits were rebuffed with the claim of “national security”. Katherine C Epstein’s narrative positions this as the birth of the security state.

Overshoot featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

The commitment to limiting the global temperature rise to 1.50C is, say the authors of this sobering account of “how the world surrendered to climate breakdown”, wavering. A fatalism has intruded which holds that the limit will be overshot. Capital, especially in the guise of the fossil fuel industry and those who pander to it, is the main culprit. According to Malm and Carton, there is hope – but it is fading.

The Story of Drawing featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

In this history of the graphic arts from pre-history to the present, Susan Owens argues that drawing has always been more than a mere preparatory stage in the creation of paintings. It is, she says, the key element of art. As the medium free from the influence of patrons and public, paper has been the place where artists have been best able to express themselves.

Bedsit Land featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

The DJ and music journalist Patrick Clarke looks at the trajectory of Soft Cell, the 1980s pop-synth duo of Marc Almond and David Ball. Through more than 60 interviews, including with the duo themselves, he puts together a full and breezy account of their career and the influences – from Soho to post-Franco Spain – behind songs such as their “Tainted Love” reboot and “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”.

Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions featured in New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

The French Nobel laureate Alain Aspect explains there has been not just one quantum revolution but two. The second is ongoing, with the results being felt in areas such as computing and communications. This, says Aspect, is the science of the future; the full potential of “entangled particles” which interact at distance is still unfolding.

The Malleus Maleficarum reviewed in the TLS

Added on 11/10/2024

The Malleus Maleficarum is a medieval inquisition document, written in Latin by the fifteenth-century German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer (under the name Henricus Institoris) and now republished in an updated translation by Peter Maxwell-Stuart. Like many medieval manuscripts it is a compilation: it contains a disquisition on the nature of magic, a series of mirabilia (marvellous anecdotes) and a practical legal handbook.

Soviet Factography reviewed in the TLS

Added on 11/10/2024

The Soviet Union in the 1920s was, in the words of the pioneering nonfiction film-maker Dziga Vertov, a “factory of facts”. Reality itself was in a state of revolution: a state that had been ravaged by war and upheaval was in the throes of modernization, throwing up new experiences and information at a dizzying rate.