News and reviews
Tulips and Peacocks reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Anyone familiar with Islamic art will long have known how heavily William Morris drew his inspiration from the Islamic world. One glance at his patterns is enough – the repetition to infinity, the twisting foliage, the richly entangled fruit and birdlife, the stylized designs that are often botanically impossible, yet speak to us at some deep primordial level – all are hallmarks of Islamic art.
READ MOREGlobal Marxism reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Apart from Christianity, Islam and perhaps liberalism, no ideology has had more global influence on political and social organization than Marxism. A generation ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, many believed that influence was likely to vanish. Yet it lives on.
READ MORETo Overthrow the World reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Apart from Christianity, Islam and perhaps liberalism, no ideology has had more global influence on political and social organization than Marxism. A generation ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, many believed that influence was likely to vanish. Yet it lives on.
READ MOREHow to Think Impossibly reviewed in the TLS
Added on 17/01/2025
Like many academics who write about philosophy or religion, I get a lot of emails from people keen to share their life stories, spiritual insights and cosmological theories. Now and then a handwritten letter arrives: most recently, on lined yellow paper with a fetching picture of pink unicorns sellotaped to the top.
READ MORENick Bano writes in the Guardian
Added on 17/01/2025
Last month, I was working with a young homeless family on England’s south coast. The local council had found them a privately rented flat with an agreed rent, and provided a “landlord incentive” payment of £1,500. But, when the council emailed the landlord to confirm the arrangements, he replied to say that he was increasing the rent by £100 a month because “the market is moving in that direction”.
READ MOREYou Can’t Please All reviewed in the Morning Star
Added on 16/01/2025
Having thoroughly enjoyed Tariq Ali’s earlier autobiographical book, Street Fighting Years, and having more than appreciated many other works such as his widely read and timely The Clash Of Fundamentalisms, it’s nice to report that this latest momentous tome was in no way a disappointment.
READ MOREFeeling at Home reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 15/01/2025
There is a well-worn acceptance today that we are in the midst of a terrible housing crisis. News of unaffordable rents, growing rates of homelessness and poor-quality properties stalks the headlines. If you’re under 40 with dreams of home ownership, you can probably forget about it. But what if the UK’s want of adequate, affordable housing is actually just the way things are, and perhaps have always been?
READ MOREAdrienne Buller writes in the Guardian
Added on 15/01/2025
Last week, as flames began tearing through greater Los Angeles, claiming multiple lives and forcing more than 100,000 people to evacuate, JP Morgan became the sixth major US bank to quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) since the start of December.
READ MOREMultitudes reviewed in the Observer
Added on 12/01/2025
At about 4pm, the riot police closed in, blocking exits from Parliament Square. After a heart-catching winter sunset, temperatures plummeted towards freezing and Dan Hancox was not alone in wanting to go home. The police had other ideas. “With their black snoods up and their thick plastic visors down,” he recalls, “the postmodern storm troopers of the Metropolitan police’s Territorial Support Group were unrelenting and unmoved.”
READ MOREThe Monastic World reviewed in the TLS
Added on 10/01/2025
Do we need another history of medieval monasticism? Across the Christian world in the Middle Ages, monasteries were central to the expression of religious devotion; they were, as Andrew Jotischky writes in The Monastic World, “the engine rooms of medieval society”. But the topic is well served by several existing studies for general readers, while the specialist can turn to the Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West (2020). What new perspectives can be brought to this much-explored institution?
READ MOREEufrasia Burlamacchi reviewed in the Art Newspaper
Added on 08/01/2025
The latest volume in the Illuminating Women Artists series focuses on the illuminated manuscripts of Sister Eufrasia (1478-1548), arguing that her contact with the High Renaissance beyond the walls of her Tuscan convent is revealed through her work.
READ MOREIslamesque review in the Guardian
Added on 08/01/2025
From Cairo to Istanbul, the ancient cities of the eastern Mediterranean tell a story of conquest, trade and coexistence written in stone. Jerusalem’s seventh-century Dome of the Rock and its surroundings are dotted with recycled Persian, Greek, Hasmonean and Roman stonework, along with choice fragments from churches. In Damascus, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque features intricately carved capitals from a Roman temple and relics of St John the Baptist transferred from the church it replaced.
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