News and reviews
The New Politics of Poland featured in the Guardian
Added on 05/08/2025
We were travelling across Poland by train the day after the country’s sensational parliamentary elections in autumn 2023. When news of the results came through, passengers in our compartment fell into each other’s arms, rejoicing as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders.
READ MOREThe Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It reviewed in Church Times
Added on 01/08/2025
This book is accessible, interesting, well-priced, and puzzling. As Professor Alec Ryrie acknowledges frankly, both in the book itself and in an excellent Church Times podcast (4 July 2025), he is straying well outside his specialist area of Reformation history by offering a unique take on post-war British culture.
READ MOREHorace reviewed in the TLS
Added on 01/08/2025
Poet on a Volcano might seem a strange choice of title for the biography of a poet whose Odes were described by George Meredith as “the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants” or “gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape”.
READ MOREAbortion reviewed in the TLS
Added on 01/08/2025
Birth rates are falling in countries across the world, including the US and the UK, as fewer women are willing to raise the number of children their leaders believe are needed to sustain society’s economic growth, demographic stability, even national identity.
READ MOREBlind Corners reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 01/08/2025
Michael Collins begins Blind Corners, a book of essays on photography, with a careful study of a picture most people wouldn’t look at twice. It is a group photo of about one hundred people in a small town in Wales in 1953. Collins describes how he found a negative of the image in a moribund photo studio and restored and printed it with the aid of a high-definition scanner.
READ MOREType Designers of the Twentieth Century reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 01/08/2025
Publishing used to be a dirty business. I’m talking not only about the ink-stained fingers of disreputable writers, but also about the filthy hands of those who actually put the words on the page: the devils and cutters who worked with metal type.
READ MOREAwake! reviewed in Church Times
Added on 01/08/2025
This is a compelling and timely book. It is compelling, because the reader shares Mark Vernon’s sense of excitement as he delves deeper and deeper into William Blake’s imaginative world and the way in which Blake’s visionary poetry also gives us vision: helps us see more deeply into the dilemmas and mysteries both of our own lives and the age in which we live.
READ MOREThe Medieval Moon reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 31/07/2025
‘The moon wanes and waxes, it is never steadfast’, wrote the author of Ancrene Wisse, a 13th-century guide for English anchoresses, ‘and signifies therefore worldly things that are as the moon ever changing.’ For anchorites immured in their cells, the moon represented everything they had rejected, the material pleasures and temptations they had overcome.
READ MOREThe Dream Factory reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 31/07/2025
It’s twenty years since James Shapiro published 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which fused literary criticism with political and social history in bravura fashion. Shapiro vigorously debunked the Romantic notion that Shakespeare was an artist who transcended his own era.
READ MOREMistress reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 31/07/2025
Once the province of the art historian, the country house has become the focus of all manner of scholarly investigations over the past forty or fifty years. Everything from the economics of estate management and the lives of domestic servants to the Jewish country house, the queer country house and the country house’s links to colonialism has come under scrutiny.
READ MOREThe Death of Consensus mention in the New Statesman
Added on 31/07/2025
Britain isn’t working – for different reasons, voters across the political spectrum affirm this view. You don’t need to subscribe to the more dystopian accounts of the country’s state to recognise its validity.
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