News and reviews

Francesca Galligan writes in the Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

Richard de Bury, as chancellor and treasurer to Edward III, was lucky enough to see all manner of books. He shared his love of them in Philobiblon, a guide for fellow bibliophiles. But this is how he described what he found in the cabinets and caskets of England’s monasteries in the 14th century:

The French Revolution reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

Is it possible to say anything new about the French Revolution? Perhaps not, unless fresh sources come to light. Whether it might be possible to say something that has been so long forgotten that it appears to be new is a different question, one that John Hardman seeks to answer in this rigorously old-fashioned, explicitly political account of the events that lie ‘at the strategic centre of modern history’.

Unfrozen reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

In the abrasive new world of strongman leaders, international institutions have lost leverage and NGOs have struggled to get a hearing (many illiberal regimes have banned them as alien influences). As the authors of this fascinating book on the Arctic argue, collaborative governance of the global commons has also atrophied.

The Maginot Line reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

In 1968, the French politician Pierre Mendès France was interviewed for the film The Sorrow and the Pity. Mendès France – who had escaped from a Vichy prison to join the Free French air force – described what he took to be the absurdity of the spirit in which the last governments of the Third Republic approached military matters before the defeat of 1940, which ended that republic.

Charlotte Blease writes in the Guardian

Added on 31/08/2025

We expect our doctors to be demi-gods – flawless, tireless, always right. But they are only human. Increasingly, they are stretched thin, working long hours, under immense pressure, and often with limited resources.

The Impossible Bomb reviewed in the Daily Mail

Added on 25/08/2025

It was two years ago that the Oscar-winning blockbuster ‘Oppenheimer‘ sent the message that it was the Americans, or rather one American in particular, who was responsible for the atomic explosion that brought the Second World War to an explosive close.

Out of the Mouths of Babes reviewed in the TLS

Added on 22/08/2025

Out of the mouths of babes comes the truth unfiltered. With little regard for the sensitivities of the adult world, young children will repeat what they have observed and heard, including a wide range of “swears” (at least in my house). In medieval French fiction and miracle tales, as Julie Singer demonstrates in this new book, a surprising number of infants are imagined as talking such truth to power.

The Maginot Line reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 22/08/2025

I don’t want to rain on the new Entente Amicale’s parade; it’s just that whenever we get cosy with the French, military disaster seems to follow.

Mihir Bose writes in the Guardian

Added on 20/08/2025

Are we, to echo Keir Starmer’s now infamous phrase, “an island of strangers”? No. But there is a deep cultural divide in this country, a cultural dissonance we don’t discuss but should. Witness the row about the Wythall Flaggers, the group that has erected numerous St George’s flags in the Worcestershire village to parade its patriotism. What does it mean?

Death to Order reviewed in the Mail on Sunday

Added on 18/08/2025

When it comes to the ‘exotic, tawdry, and very confusing’ subject of assassinations, there have been few lone wolves. Simon Ball’s exhaustive study shows that, behind every shot fired, there’s usually a complicated conspiracy.

Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript reviewed in the TLS

Added on 15/08/2025

Among the treasures of the British Library is an unassuming manuscript identified by the shelfmark MS Cotton Nero A.x/2. Named after its early-modern collector, Sir Robert Cotton, and the Roman emperor whose bust once sat atop its shelf in Cotton’s library, the manuscript is a little smaller than seven inches long and five inches wide, the size of a very small paperback.

Boccaccio reviewed in the TLS

Added on 15/08/2025

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron consists of 100 stories divided between ten narrators, all Florentines who have withdrawn to the countryside to hide out from the Black Death. The ninth tale told on the sixth day features Guido Cavalcanti, “one of the best logicians in the world and an excellent natural philosopher … a very elegant and cultivated man and very fluent in his speech”.