News and reviews

Paul Foot reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 25/07/2024

Not long before he died in 2004, Paul Foot wrote an obituary of his friend Tony Cliff, with whom he worked for many years on the Socialist Worker. “Of all the awful crimes of the left, none infuriated Cliff like passivity. For people who knew the world was rotten, to sit back and do nothing about it was for him the ultimate aberration.”

Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England: Staffordshire review – Observer

Added on 21/07/2024

In the 1940s, a refugee from Nazi Germany called Nikolaus Pevsner started travelling round the lanes and streets of England, armed with sheaves of notes compiled in advance from lengthy research, cataloguing the noteworthy structures in meticulous-going-on-obsessive detail. It was an outsider’s act of love for his adopted country, a homage to the recently imperilled heritage of a nation that had survived war.

Behind the Privet Hedge reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 20/07/2024

Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in 1916.

44 Days In Prague reviewed in the TLS

Added on 19/07/2024

On August 3, 1938, the British mediator Walter Runciman arrived in Prague tasked with solving a seemingly intractable problem. When Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918 it included the Sudetenland, a band of territory along the border with Germany where three million Germans lived. Now the Sudetens, encouraged by the rise of Nazism, were demanding legal and territorial autonomy.

The Specter of the Archive

Added on 19/07/2024

Nicholas Popper’s book opens with William Bowyer, Elizabethan keeper of the records in the Tower of London, reorganizing governmental records and making them more easily retrievable. There followed a great growth in the quantity of government archive materials in the Tower and beyond, which has been sustained pretty continuously ever since. In fact, a century later, Joseph Williamson, a secretary of state and Charles II’s “information master”, based his influence on command of this mass of written records.

A Twist in the Tail reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 19/07/2024

The anchovy is the Marmite of the aquatic world. Love it or hate it, neutrality isn’t an option. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, found them repulsive. Horace was pithier: “They stink.” But Christopher Beckman, horror film producer turned food historian, swears by them. A Twist in the Tail is his delightful tribute to this diminutive fish.

John Bowers writes in Prospect

Added on 18/07/2024

The last few years has seen a major decline in public standards. Together, a generation of fast revolving ministers have disfigured public life, and the scandals of wallpapergate, Pinchergate, partygate and others have tainted parliament and government.

Balzac’s Paris reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 17/07/2024

Eric Hazan, a lifelong Parisian who died in June, wrote several books about his hometown, with a particular focus on the class politics of the built environment. In Balzac’s Paris he revisits the 19th-century social geography of the French capital through the fiction of one of its most famous novelists.

Mihir Bose writes in the Guardian

Added on 17/07/2024

English football fans may never agree on Gareth Southgate’s footballing legacy, and will long debate whether he deprived the so-called golden generation of ending 58 years of hurt. But what cannot and should not be disputed is that Southgate has fundamentally reshaped England men’s football off the field.

Spycraft reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 13/07/2024

‘Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,/ Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff,/ Stink, and are thrown away.’ Ben Jonson likened his fellow secret agents to a tallow candle: a grotty necessity, to be discarded without regret.

The Afterlife of Data reviewed in Nature

Added on 12/07/2024

Printed books can immortalize the dead. But what should happen to posthumous online presence, asks political scientist Carl Öhman in his stimulating, sometimes spooky book.

Second Chances reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 10/07/2024

Most of us vaguely remember encountering Marx’s pithy observation about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Repetition can be absurd, the embarrassingly shallow and artificial effort to recreate what’s lost, or to appropriate the dramatic dignity of past events to clothe the naked triviality of what is currently going on.