News and reviews
Vatican Spies reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 05/01/2025
Popes used to control vast areas of Italy – the so-called “papal states”. But when the unification of Italy was finally completed after the capture of Rome in 1870, only about 120 acres of central Rome were left in papal possession. Popes railed against the Italian state until the Lateran Pacts were signed with Benito Mussolini in 1929, when each side recognised the other and the theocratic Vatican City was created.
READ MOREOn Close Reading reviewed in the TLS
Added on 03/01/2025
One of my school students, Sam, comes to my Monday English clinic to work on his close reading. He expresses frustration at the process, which seems unnecessarily mysterious to him. He knows that there is some correspondence between the details he might observe in a given passage and the quality of the analysis he produces. If I could give him a step-by-step guide to how to do it, he says – a list of things to look for – then maybe he could get better at it.
READ MOREThe Worlds of Victor Sassoon reviewed in History Today
Added on 01/01/2025
We are sometimes inclined to compare our own imperfect times with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century: global elites wielding extraordinary political and economic power, a yawning gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else, cities plagued with shocking inequalities.
READ MOREEating and Being reviewed in Nature
Added on 19/12/2024
In seventeenth-century England, people often commented after a meal: “We ourselves have had ourselves upon our trenchers”. This is an early version of today’s well-worn aphorism, ‘you are what you eat’. In Eating and Being, historian Steven Shapin explores this idea and how philosophies of food have shaped the Western sense of self.
READ MOREPink Pilled reviewed in the Independent
Added on 15/12/2024
Misogyny and male supremacy might lie at the heart of far-right ideology but that does not mean women are absent from such movements – with some caught up in the race riots that exploded across the UK this summer.
READ MORECharles Hecker writes in the Spectator
Added on 11/12/2024
Carlsberg, the brewing giant whose presence in Russia transformed that country’s beverage market, has left. What remains is the lingering residue of a boozy party that peaked too soon, ended in a brawl and left many questions dangling.
READ MOREAs I Please reviewed in the Morning Star
Added on 10/12/2024
One of the most celebrated political cartoonists of our age, Martin Rowson has a decades-long written record of equally skilful takedowns of the world’s many hypocrisies and hypocrites, proving to the detractors that cartoonists can write. Shock, horror!
READ MOREWalking in the Dark reviewed in the TLS
Added on 06/12/2024
As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier terms for the psychological effects of such an existence, “double consciousness” and “the veil”, and foreshadowed the findings (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who considered that the Black brain might be scrambled into psychosis by racism.
READ MORECode Name Puritan reviewed in the TLS
Added on 06/12/2024
Norman Holmes Pearson was a familiar mid-twentieth-century academic: a popular teacher, active committee member and organizer of conferences who never quite finished his major book. He spent his life in the Yale English department, and collected rare books and manuscripts, while fostering relationships with poets, colleagues and students at home and abroad. Born into New England’s upper-middle class, he married into the wealthy Winchester rifle family. When Greg Barnhisel began this biography, a colleague asked: “Why would you want to write about him?”
READ MOREOn James Baldwin reviewed in the TLS
Added on 06/12/2024
As Ralph Ellison wrote in 1944, “To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races”. Ellison both echoed W. E. B. Du Bois’s earlier terms for the psychological effects of such an existence, “double consciousness” and “the veil”, and foreshadowed the findings (in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) of the French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who considered that the Black brain might be scrambled into psychosis by racism.
READ MORERobert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 01/12/2024
It is almost obligatory for a review of a book about Robert Hooke to characterise him as ‘overlooked’ or even ‘forgotten’, and to complain of his eclipse by Newton. The most melodramatic authors will add the story – entirely spurious – that Newton ordered the destruction of Hooke’s portrait upon assuming the presidency of the Royal Society in 1703. In fact, Hooke has never been forgotten.
READ MOREAs I Please and Other Writings 1986–2024 reviewed in the Independent
Added on 01/12/2024
Martin Rowson is one of Britain’s best-known satirical cartoonists. He is also a writer and his essays and columns – including for Tribune, the Guardian and the Independent – are collected in As I Please and Other Writings 1986-2024.
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