News and reviews

Vatican Spies reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 07/02/2025

Since it became independent in 1929, Vatican City has been the world’s smallest state. Every evening the gates close, leaving behind only 500 permanent residents. I once spent a week behind the walls as a guest in the Santa Marta hostel where the Pope lives; at night the deserted courtyards are thrillingly spooky.

Listen In reviewed in the Daily Mail

Added on 07/02/2025

When the BBC was founded in 1922 it was not completely clear what it was for. ‘If there is any news’, explained an early edition of the Radio Times helpfully, ‘it will be broadcast at 9pm’.

Humans in Shackles reviewed in the LSE Review of Books

Added on 06/02/2025

At the close of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eponymous revenant representing the deepest traumas of slavery’s violence has finally left the house she haunted. After a while, even her recurring footprints are forgotten: “by and by all trace is gone”. She is not simply forgotten but “disremembered and unaccounted for”.

My Country, Africa reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 06/02/2025

There is much to unpick from the title alone of My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria. The reference to Africa as a country describes the pan-Africanist philosophy of Andree Blouin, a mixed heritage woman born in the Central African Republic. It is important to understand that Blouin’s support for pan-Africanism — as she appears to interpret it, as a United States of Africa — does not mean she was a socialist. She was not.

Toi Te Mana reviewed in the Art Newspaper

Added on 04/02/2025

This volume covers 800 years of Māori art, exploring a range of art practices including raranga (plaiting), whatu (weaving), moko (tattooing), and whakairo (carving). The volume, written by a trio of Māori art historians, took 12 years to complete and focuses on “exploring the idea of Indigenous art histories that value Indigenous voices, perspective and objectives, making art history more relevant and less Eurocentric”, the authors say.

A Man of Few Words reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 03/02/2025

When Primo Levi, the Turin-born chemist and nuanced chronicler of the human condition, pondered quite how he had survived Auschwitz, he gave the credit to a gruff bricklayer called Lorenzo Perrone: “not so much for his material aid”, he wrote, “as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror… for which it was worth surviving”.

If Only reviewed in the LRB

Added on 03/02/2025

Norwegians make a fuss about first books. The newspapers publish round-ups of the year’s literary debutants, who are invited to writers’ workshops organised specially for them. In 1983, two young authors met at one such workshop in Sweden.

Overshoot reviewed in the LRB

Added on 03/02/2025

Around fifteen years ago, a new term entered the climate change lexicon: stranded assets. The concept was straightforward enough. If global warming is to be kept from getting out of hand, there is a limit to the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted into the atmosphere.

Christopher Hill reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/02/2025

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming historian Christopher Hill.

Under Cover of Darkness reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 31/01/2025

Most Americans gained their impression of London during the Blitz from the radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow on CBS. Murrow lionized the resilience and decency of ordinary Londoners and their heroic resistance to the Nazi threat, and his reports were a vital means of connecting the still neutral U.S. to the perils of the war in Europe.

Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers reviewed in the TLS

Added on 31/01/2025

Early in Shakespeare in Love, as Will is hurrying through London to his psychiatrist, he hears a Puritan preacher “haranguing anyone who will listen to him”, as Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay puts it. The preacher inveighs against the Curtain theatre before turning to the other playhouse: “And the Rose smells thusly rank by any name! I say a plague on both their houses!”. The screenplay adds a direction: “As he passes WILL gratefully makes a mental note”.

Family Romance reviewed in the TLS

Added on 31/01/2025

In 1898, Asher Wertheimer, a leading London art dealer, marked his silver wedding anniversary by commissioning John Singer Sargent to paint two portraits, one of himself and one of his wife. Sargent went on to paint all ten of the Wertheimers’ sons and daughters, and became a close friend of the family. Asher Wertheimer would eventually bequeath nine of the ten portraits to the National Gallery with the request that they should be displayed together, which they were amid controversy in 1923.