News and reviews
Beastly Britain reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 24/05/2025
This is a truly wonderful book, erudite and fun. Karen R. Jones, a kind of alternative David Attenborough, explains her purpose: ‘Charismatic and amazing creatures are not only to be found in distant places. They are here.
READ MOREThe Librarian’s Atlas reviewed in the TLS
Added on 23/05/2025
The notion of the universe as a book, an ancient trope that Ernst Robert Curtius traced in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), works in both directions. If the universe is a book, then the book is the universe, since (in scriptural terms) God is the Author of both.
READ MOREThe Wagner Group reviewed in the TLS
Added on 23/05/2025
In early May 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company that was waging a fierce battle for the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, posted a video tirade on social media showing himself walking through rows of corpses.
READ MOREThe Wagner Group reviewed in the TLS
Added on 23/05/2025
In early May 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company that was waging a fierce battle for the city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, posted a video tirade on social media showing himself walking through rows of corpses.
READ MOREDanny Dorling interview in the LSE Review of Books
Added on 21/05/2025
In this interview with LSE Review of Books Managing Editor Anna D’Alton, Danny Dorling discusses his new book,The Next Crisis: What We Think About the Future which examines survey data on what worries the public most, finding that the answers can differ significantly from what’s in the headlines.
READ MOREMedium Hot feature in Frieze
Added on 20/05/2025
For those interested in how digital technology contributes to the general clusterfuck most of us are experiencing these days, here is a list of texts I read last year. These recommendations form a solid base with which to face the current wave of authoritarian tech bullshit, including the idea that there is or was ever anything inherently democratic in it.
READ MOREThe Most Dangerous Man in Britain? reviewed in the Tribune
Added on 19/05/2025
We are fortunate that the three pillars of Tony Benn’s socialism — for the radical democratisation of politics, the Alternative Economic Strategy, and anti-war internationalism — were explored in so many of his articles, interviews, and speeches in Parliament, on demonstrations, at conferences, and on picket lines.
READ MOREJonathan Goodman writes in the Guardian
Added on 18/05/2025
A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.
READ MOREHomeland reviewed in the TLS
Added on 16/05/2025
During protests in the US in the middle of 2020, a Predator drone circled in the sky above Minneapolis. Some 20,000ft below, the cops got to play with their toys: Humvees, armoured carriers with turrets, stuff built for the military, used extensively in the Middle East and sold at knockdown prices to local sheriffs.
READ MOREPsyche Running reviewed in the TLS
Added on 16/05/2025
A poem in Durs Grünbein’s collection Equidistance, published in 2022, the year of his sixtieth birthday, evokes equidistance as a line passing through Berlin: “East-West-Axis”. So far, perhaps, so Grünbein. The axis configuring Berlin has configured the work of Germany’s most significant living poet in multifarious ways since he first emerged – pre-reunification – with Mornings in the Grey Zone(1988).
READ MOREMrs Dalloway reviewed in the TLS
Added on 16/05/2025
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, was published on May 14, 1925. Released to coincide with the centenary of one of Woolf’s most popular novels, Mark Hussey’s analysis concerns a productive and prolific period in the author’s life.
READ MOREHorace featured in the Daily Mail
Added on 16/05/2025
In the autumn of 44 BC, after Julius Caesar’s brutal assassination, the ringleader, Brutus, was in Athens raising support for a full-scale conquest of Italy that would restore the values of the old Roman Republic.
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