News and reviews

Vatican Spies reviewed in the Independent

Added on 01/12/2024

Espionage in the Vatican goes back to Pope Pius V in the late 16th century and continues up to the present day. In his candid, wide-ranging study, Yvonnick Denoël, a French historian who has written on the CIA, Mossad and spying in the 20th century, draws on freshly released foreign service archives for Vatican Spies: From the Second World War to Pope Francis, an interesting study translated from the French by Alan McKay.

Book Curses reviewed in the TLS

Added on 29/11/2024

Medieval manuscripts are full of warnings to would-be miscreants, but, as Eleanor Baker’s book makes clear, curses meant to protect the written word are not an invention of the Middle Ages. A temple dedicated to the sun god Shamash by Yahdun-Lim, king of the city-state of Mari, in what is now Syria, between 1820 and 1796 BCE, wishes death and devastation on any who might defile the temple or mar its inscriptions, and even on their descendants.

Where to start with: Hanif Kureishi feature in the Guardian

Added on 25/11/2024

Two years ago, on Boxing Day 2022, novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi suffered a fall in Rome that left him paralysed. Since then, with the help of family members, he has been recounting his devastating experience of “becoming divorced from [himself]” on Substack and in a memoir, Shattered, published earlier this year.

Ignorance and Bliss reviewed in the Observer

Added on 24/11/2024

This is at once a wise and wonderfully enjoyable book. Mark Lilla treats weighty matters with a light touch, in an elegant prose style that crackles with dry wit. Almost every one of the short sections into which the narrative is divided – and there is a narrative, cunningly sustained within what seems a relaxed discursiveness – takes careful aim and at the end hits the bullseye with a sure and satisfying aphoristic thwock.

Plantation Goods reviewed in the TLS

Added on 22/11/2024

In 1854 the fortunes of North Brookfield, Massachusetts were improving. A Congregational minister welcomed the fact, but worried that “not one dollar in fifty” in the shoe-manufacturing town “passes through our hands that is not probably derived” from “Southern slavery”.

Madrid reviewed in the TLS

Added on 22/11/2024

The origins of the modern-day Spanish nation do not predate the existence of empire. In 1492 the Genovese adventurer Christopher Columbus set sail under the flags of the Catholic Monarchs – Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon – whose dynastic union and reconquest of Muslim territories laid the foundations for a unified country that, between 1580 and 1668, incorporated Portugal.

The Story of Drawing awarded Apollo’s Book of the Year 2024

Added on 21/11/2024

Drawing, as Susan Owens notes in this virtuosic study, is almost impossible to define. The word ‘can mean anything from the lightest sketch to the most complete, fully realised work of art’. The drawings Owens selects range from scratches on limestone, via charcoal, chalk and ink, to wire structures and splatters of bodily fluids.

Extract from Dr Calhoun’s Mousery in the Guardian

Added on 21/11/2024

Standing before the Royal Society of Medicine in London on 22 June 1972, the ecologist turned psychologist John Bumpass Calhoun, the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, appeared a mild-mannered, smallish man, sporting a greying goatee.

Sara Lodge writes in History Today

Added on 19/11/2024

For those who sought their services, there were many professional female detectives in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s, and not just in London – you could find them in Bristol, in Cardiff and in Glasgow, too. By January 1875 The Times was advertising, back-to-back, the services of the ‘Confidential Agency’ of Leslie and Graham in Holborn, assisted by ‘men of 20 years’ experience, and female detectives’, and Arthur Cleveland Montagu in Cornhill, which offered ‘a large staff of experienced detectives, male and female’.

Catesby’s Natural History featured in the Spectator’s Best Gardening Books 2024

Added on 16/11/2024

I am an absolute sucker for a handsome reproduction of a rare and highly illustrated natural history, preferably more than two centuries old. This may possibly be a niche interest, but Catesby’s Natural History was pronounced a wonder when it was first published and is a wonder still.

Family Romance reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 15/11/2024

The arrangement between an artist and a patron can be a delicate one, filigreed with implicit understandings and potential hazards. Patrons often provide financial help in return for the chance to varnish their prestige. Artists, in turn, can find themselves working within constraints set by a patron’s tastes, though they are ever eager to find room for some degree of creative freedom.

Sea Level reviewed in the TLS

Added on 15/11/2024

A few miles along the coast from Aberystwyth, where I am writing, are the petrified remains of a forest. They are all that is left of Gwyddno Garanhir’s lost kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, submerged beneath the sea in a single night’s cataclysm. That’s a myth, of course (though the petrified forest is real enough). Nevertheless, the story helps to highlight one of this highly topical book’s key themes: that many of the geographical features of the world around us that might seem immutable are not really so at all.