News and reviews

Who Am I to Judge featured in the Guardian

Added on 08/03/2025

Should Donald Trump get the chance to nominate a new justice to the supreme court, to join the three rightwingers he installed in his first term, he might pick “the equivalent of Pete Hegseth”, Mark Tushnet said, referring to the Fox News host who is now US secretary of defense.

Ballerina reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 08/03/2025

There are, broadly speaking, two types of artist: the explorer and the miner. The explorer keeps moving on, staking out new aesthetic or thematic terrain, while the miner keeps returning, digging deeper into the same earth each time. Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel prizewinner for literature in 2014, is an artist firmly of the second camp.

You Can’t Please All reviewed in the TLS

Added on 07/03/2025

Pally with Bertrand Russell and Mick Jagger, begging to get on the roof of a house in Hanoi to shoot at the final futile waves of Operation Rolling Thunder, wiping the floor with Henry Kissinger at the Oxford Union, mistaken for Che Guevara’s bodyguard and arrested in Bolivia, nearly breaching the citadel of the US embassy in Grosvenor Square – the writer and activist Tariq Ali had, you might say, a pretty good Cold War.

The Fiery Spirits reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 06/03/2025

Connecting mass political movements with parliamentary representation is a perennial issue for the left in Britain and, indeed, elsewhere. It is correct to say that the former — the struggle beyond the Palace of Westminster — is the determining factor in political outcomes, but also true that parliamentary articulation can help shape and empower the movement, even as MPs draw strength from it.

Listen In reviewed in the Observer

Added on 02/03/2025

One hundred years ago this summer, from high above Daventry in Northamptonshire, voices began to beam into the homes of 20 million people. They came from the 500ft tall Borough Hill transmitter – truly revolutionary technology in 1925 – which opened with a new work, Daventry Calling, by the poet Alfred Noyes.

Turner and Constable reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/03/2025

This book is billed as providing a ‘fresh’ look at its subject. It needs to, since the pairing of Turner and Constable is a hoary one, dating from their own lifetimes and repeatedly – even tediously – proposed since. To her great credit, Nicola Moorby manages never to be tedious. She orchestrates this well-worn theme with thoughtfulness, tying her analysis to close observation of the works.

Hayek vs Keynes reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 28/02/2025

Neither John Maynard Keynes nor Friedrich von Hayek wanted to see the devastation of the Great Depression or the second world war again. Both understood how economics and politics could tear societies apart.

J.–K. Huysmans reviewed in the TLS

Added on 28/02/2025

When Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans published his novel À rebours in 1884, he was still a part-time author. By day, the thirty-six-year-old Parisian was a civil servant. At night he wrote, visited his long-suffering lover and attended salons with Émile Zola, his literary mentor.

Christopher Hill reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 28/02/2025

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming historian Christopher Hill.

Christopher Hill reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 28/02/2025

When I was studying for my A-Level History exams, I sometimes used to pop into Foyle’s bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road to browse the voluminous History shelves, and on one of my visits I came across The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 by Christopher Hill, published in 1961.

Maria Theresa reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 26/02/2025

The role of personality and charm in running a state is one theme of Richard Bassett’s superb book, the first English biography of the Empress Maria Theresa since Edward Crankshaw’s in 1969. The different parts of the Habsburg monarchy – Austria, Tyrol, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and Milan – had little in common except dynasty, geography and Catholicism.

Maria Theresa featured in Tatler

Added on 24/02/2025

A ruthless ruler and opponent, devoted wife and mother to sixteen children, Maria Theresa’s forty year rule over her European territories is nothing if not miraculous.