News and reviews

Shiraz Maher writes in the New Statesman

Added on 12/08/2024

It has been almost 20 years since the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London, which killed 52 people. A suicide video filmed by the British-Pakistani ringleader of the attacks, Mohammad Sidique Khan, sought to justify his terrorism as retaliation for “the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people”.

Behind the Privet Hedge reviewed in the TLS

Added on 09/08/2024

The title Behind the Privet Hedge implies secrets of the net-curtain-twitching variety, but Michael Gilson’s book is actually about looking out rather than looking in. It is about community rather than privacy (though the latter is a theme that increases in importance).

The Design of Books reviewed in the TLS

Added on 09/08/2024

Have you ever had to look up words such as “verso”, “recto”, “pica” or “serif”? Wondered why the type is easy to read in some books, but leaves you exhausted after a paragraph in others? Questioned what is going on with all those blank pages at the back? Here at last is an excellent layperson’s introduction to the often opaque world of book design.

All Mapped Out reviewed in the TLS

Added on 09/08/2024

All Mapped Out by Mike Duggan also starts from the premiss that “maps do different things for different people”. A researcher in digital culture and society, Duggan believes that “the power of maps to influence minds is not an exact science”, so he takes a qualitative, nuanced approach.

Liberty’s Grid reviewed in the TLS

Added on 09/08/2024

For more than 500 years people have tried to map Utopia. The first attempt appeared in 1516, illustrating Thomas More’s account of a perfectionist human community, for which he coined the word (and concept) of utopia. The map shows a crescent-shaped island with cities scattered unevenly around its ragged coastlines.

The Newsmongers reviewed in the Observer

Added on 04/08/2024

The average Observer reader might be unfamiliar with contemporary tabloid newspapers, but in this informative – if overlong – survey of that subsection of journalism, Terry Kirby studies everyone from Daniel Defoe to Rupert Murdoch, ruthlessly dissecting their venality and opportunism.

There Be Stone Dragons reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 03/08/2024

This book offers a challenge. John Stewart, a retired architect now an architectural historian, encourages us when we walk the city streets to raise our eyes to parapet level and open our minds to the incredible ornamental detail and range of symbols that bedeck major public and institutional buildings.

Act Now reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 02/08/2024

What an incredibly timely book this is. The authors, featuring Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson and Danny Dorling, are a collective of leading figures from academia, politics and industry who share a common belief in the need for pragmatic reform to end our crisis.

Thank You Mr Crombie reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 02/08/2024

Journalist Mihir Bose has produced a fascinating book chronicling his life: growing up in India, then moving to Britain, where he eventually works his way into journalism.

Letters Around A Garden reviewed in the TLS

Added on 26/07/2024

In Switzerland’s Rhône Valley, nestled in a landscape of vineyards, orchards and meadows, stands the Château de Muzot – a small fortified manor dating back to the thirteenth century. In the early 1920s this quadrangular two-storey structure, topped with a stepped gable roof, was purchased and restored by an affluent philanthropist, Werner Reinhart. Thanks to Reinhart’s patronage, it is here that Rainer Maria Rilke retreated in the aftermath of the First World War.

The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer reviewed in Church Times

Added on 26/07/2024

Who was Thomas Müntzer, asks Andrew Drummond. Was he, as Martin Luther suggested, a “ravening wolf”, a “false prophet” who stirred up rebellion and bloodshed? (Each chapter opens with a juicy piece of invective by a member of Luther’s Wittenberg team). Or was Müntzer, as his admirers have suggested, a hero of the downtrodden, a harbinger of spiritual, social, and political equality?

The Gulag Doctors reviewed in the TLS

Added on 26/07/2024

Fifty years ago the writer and former prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the KGB, stripped of his citizenship and deported from the Soviet Union. He had been charged with treason, but his principal crime was to have authorized the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in Paris some months earlier. As a reviewer wrote in these pages under the heading “The country of Gulag” (TLS, February 22, 1974), Solzhenitsyn’s book would “survive as one of the bravest and finest of mankind’s bequests to posterity”.