News and reviews

The Story of Nature reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 14/09/2024

It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers?

Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective featured in the Observer

Added on 08/09/2024

Some of the “searchers” were skilled at inspecting the clothes, hair and genitals of Victorian women and finding stolen money and pawn tickets for stolen goods. Others undertook risky sting operations, catching thieves and criminals red-handed and successfully testifying against them in court.

Endgame reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 05/09/2024

Jamie Merchant is media director for the Center for Progressive Strategy. He depicts the decline of capitalism, focusing on the US and British economies.

US real growth per head averaged 2.3 per cent from 1953 to 1973, 2 per cent from 1973 to 2007, and 0.7 per cent from 2007 to 2019. From 1950 to 1973, the world economy grew on average by 2.92 per cent per head, by 1.8 per cent from 1973 to 1990, then by 1.5 per cent, down to 1.2 per cent in 2019.

To Overthrow the World reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2024

There was a time, as Sean McMeekin reminds us, when public commentators were in near total-consensus. Communism had been tossed aside in eastern Europe in 1989. Two years later it met the same fate in the Soviet Union. In China the communist leadership was by then pursuing the benefits of capitalist economics. Governments actually committed to communism remained in only a few countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, and it seemed that the wheel of global history had turned irreversibly against it.

Jeffrey J Kripal interview in the Observer

Added on 01/09/2024

Jeffrey J Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of 10 books on the history of mysticism, psychology and the paranormal. His latest, How to Think Impossibly, draws on a range of sources including gnosticism, quantum physics and English romantic philosophy, to attempt a new theory of mind and the imagination.

Seven Children reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 28/08/2024

This book takes a novel approach to examining how one in three children live in poverty in the sixth-richest country in the world. That country is the UK.

Building on his previous book, Shattered Nation, Dorling drills down to see how seven strata of British children are affected by the poverty and inequality so rampant here.

Oliver Cromwell reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 24/08/2024

One of the most notorious episodes in the siege of Drogheda, when more than 3,000 Irish people were killed by an English army headed by Oliver Cromwell, came when Cromwell and his troops chased a renegade band of the enemy up into the steeple of St Peter’s church. When the fleeing detachment of soldiers refused to surrender, Cromwell ordered that the steeple be burned.

General Hastings “Pug” Ismay reviewed in the TLS

Added on 23/08/2024

Field Marshal Lord Slim once wrote: “moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage”. General Sir Hastings “Pug” Ismay, the subject of John Kiszely’s new biography, possessed moral courage by the bucketful. As Winston Churchill’s long-suffering wartime chief of staff, he was positioned between the prime minister and the service chiefs, acting as a lightning conductor between these two warring factions.

Brendan Simms writes in the New Statesman

Added on 21/08/2024

In Ukraine, the summer often brings surprises. Nobody predicted that at the end of August 2022, Ukrainian forces would begin the offensive that would push the Russians out of Kherson in the south; a few days later, they struck in the north-east around Kharkhiv and ejected the Russians from most of the territory they had taken in that area at the beginning of the war.

Shiraz Maher writes in the New Statesman

Added on 17/08/2024

It feels like everyone already knows Anjem Choudary. After being dubbed Britain’s “best-known Islamic extremist”, he was a kind of anti-celebrity. For the best part of two decades he was a regular feature on our airways, appearing after almost every terrorist outrage to push an insensitive, indignant or otherwise irritable message.

Herod the Great reviewed in the TLS

Added on 16/08/2024

Of all the villains in the New Testament, Herod the Great probably has the most unfair reputation. Pilate crucified Jesus; Herod’s son Antipas executed John the Baptist; even Judas’ betrayal is plausible. But Matthew, in his gospel, invented “the Massacre of the Innocents” as a parallel to the Pharaoh’s massacre of the newborns in the Book of Exodus, and the story stuck.

The Newsmongers reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 15/08/2024

Terry Kirby was one of the founding reporters for The Independent and worked his way through various senior positions in the paper. He now teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on journalism at Goldsmiths.

As such, The Newsmongers is a broadsheet journalist’s account of tabloid journalism. It focuses on the narrative of the story, keeps the who-what-when-why-how front and centre, has many central villains, and few heroes.