News and reviews

Serbia reviewed in the TLS

Added on 21/06/2024

Serbia is modern Europe’s odd man out. Today, this small Balkan country sits comfortably outside the European Union and NATO, at a time when nearly every other European country is either a member or aspiring member of both. Its people would seemingly sooner be engulfed by the institutional West than ever be a part of it.

The Abiy Project extract in The Guardian

Added on 20/06/2024

I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about Abiy Ahmed.” The message flashed up from someone I had been told to call Napoleon. It was the middle of 2023, six years after I had first arrived in Ethiopia, and one year after I had left, in the midst of a war which was tearing it apart. Ethiopia was lurching from crisis to crisis, and behind each of them loomed one figure larger than any other: the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.

Disordered Attention reviewed in ArtReview

Added on 17/06/2024

‘Attention’, in art historian Claire Bishop’s deft examination of post-1990s contemporary art, is in all kinds of trouble. That’s the result, in large part, of digital networks and the new culture of mediation, in which the space between reality, experience and image is collapsed via social media.

Welcome to the Club extract in the Idler

Added on 17/06/2024

It’s a balmy, Parisian evening in 2011, and I’ve been on one of my favourite walks past Père Lachaise, that grand city within a cemetery, to meet Gilles Peterson and friends at Mama Shelter. I had been living and DJ’ing in Paris for seven years and, call it loyalty or tradition, whenever Gilles was on the radio I emailed in for a shout out, and if he was in town, I made the trip to see him, Rob Gallagher, Sean Rollins and the Brownswood record label crew.

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/06/2024

Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Serbia reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 14/06/2024

Serbia is a wounded country. Its past overflows with legends of gallant resistance and glorious triumph. Yet Serbian nationalism is animated by the grievances of defeat. The Turks conquered and degraded it. NATO bombed it. The European Union spurns it. Serbia’s neighbors, from Croatia to Hungary, have been accepted into Europe; Serbia, however, continues to be stigmatized as the instigator of World War I and memorialized as the cause of the last genocide on European soil in the 20th century.

Behind the Privet Hedge reviewed in the FT

Added on 13/06/2024

Edith Sitwell, aristo-poet and dreary snob, whose 17th-century ancestral home came with vast gardens and staff to tend them, once described working-class novelist DH Lawrence as looking like “a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden”. Then, as now, “suburban” is reserved for special horticultural disdain in Britain.

Solvable reviewed in Nature

Added on 12/06/2024

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit.

God’s Scrivener reviewed in the TLS

Added on 07/06/2024

The American poet Jones Very (1813–80), subject of Clark Davis’s thorough and engaging God’s Scrivener, is generally remembered as a curious secondary figure in the Transcendentalist movement.

The Point of the Needle reviewed in the TLS

Added on 07/06/2024

Barbara Burman became interested in the stitch “as perhaps one of the smallest things a historian could think about” during research for her book The Pocket: A hidden history of women’s lives, 1660–1900, written with Ariane Fennetaux (2019).

Unsuitable reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 06/06/2024

When it comes to lesbians, clothes can really shape our place in the world,” says the fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst. “They can let us be recognised by others in our community, or allow us to be hidden to the world at large.”

Round Our Way reviewed in Prospect

Added on 05/06/2024

Sam Hanna was one of the most prolific English filmmakers of the 20th century. His work spanned six decades. He made 270 documentary films. Have you heard of him?

Born in Burnley in 1903, Hanna left school at the age of 12 to work in a cotton mill, turned to furniture design and cabinetmaking, and then became a woodwork teacher. His colleagues looked down on the subject—too manual, too vocational—and didn’t let him share the staff room.