News and reviews

Reading Practice reviewed in the TLS

Added on 09/06/2025

One of the great utopian promises of the internet was that it could teach you how to do anything. When we need to fix a water-damaged iPhone, cook a recipe, revive a faltering houseplant or treat a nasty blister, we turn to Google first. But that promise was only half kept.

Awake! selected as The Idler’s Book of the Week

Added on 09/06/2025

Blake sought recovery. He strove to awaken and embolden a re-expanded imagination through the use of poetry, imagery, and piercing insights. Further, unlike many of the Romantic figures with whom he is often grouped, he did not proceed by rejecting the political and technological revolutions that so dramatically marked his era (and have continued in our own), or by appealing to lost times and distant moods, as if he were a lone, tragic visionary.

Sand, Snow and Stardust reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 06/06/2025

In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year.

Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age reviewed in the TLS

Added on 06/06/2025

In 1924, on a rainy December day in Rome, a small crowd of doctors and journalists led by a bearded man in robes filed out of a theatre and gathered around a pit. The robed man stuffed cotton into his nose and ears, then climbed into the hole, where he was covered with soil.

Darwin’s Savages reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 06/06/2025

It was a journey Bruce Chatwin hankered to make: to Southampton and the grave of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the exiled Argentine dictator described in the Southampton Times after his funeral in 1877 as ‘one of the most cruel, remorseless and sanguinary tyrants who ever existed on Earth’.

Turner & Constable reviewed in the Art Newspaper

Added on 03/06/2025

It is surprisingly difficult to discuss Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) without mentioning John Constable (1776-1837), or vice versa. This is an inevitable consequence of the extraordinary coincidence that two of Great Britain’s most stellar national treasures not only worked in the same field of pioneering landscape painting but were also born just 14 months apart.

Disaster Nationalism reviewed in the LRB

Added on 02/06/2025

One way of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy.

Vanessa Bell reviewed in the Apollo

Added on 02/06/2025

In 1916, Vanessa Bell moved to Sussex with her lover Duncan Grant, his lover David Garnett and the two sons she had by her husband, Clive, who paid visits to the unconventional ménage with his latest flame, Mary, in tow.

Medium Hot reviewed in Apollo

Added on 01/06/2025

During the second half of the 20th century the favoured metaphor for the effortless and detached exercise of power was ‘the push of a button’. It linked everyone from ordinary citizens through to the leaders of nations, for whom this same gesture could activate anything from an ice maker to nuclear war.

Mrs Dalloway featured in the Literary Review

Added on 01/06/2025

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work.

Something Speaks to Me reviewed in the TLS

Added on 30/05/2025

At the end of Something Speaks to Me, Michel Chaouli exhorts the reader to carry on the work of “poetic criticism” that his book has been advocating. Now, he says, it’s “Your turn”.

Our Dollar, Your Problem reviewed in the TLS

Added on 30/05/2025

In a world where many currencies circulate, one of them invariably comes out on top. Great prestige accrues to the country that issues the dominant currency. The issuer enjoys other advantages besides, such as the ability to borrow at lower interest rates, and weaker constraints on how much it can borrow.