News and reviews
Enshittification excerpt in the Guardian
Added on 05/10/2025
It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with.
READ MOREBritish Blonde reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 01/10/2025
What do we think of when we think of blondes? Perhaps Scandinavia, where blonde hair is commonplace, or iconic blonde stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. Sexy Swedes, brash Americans or free-spirited Frenchwomen – not Britishness, that’s for sure.
READ MOREVanessa Bell reviewed in the Art Newspaper
Added on 01/10/2025
There is an inherent tension present from the opening pages of Wendy Hitchmough’s new biography, Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical.
READ MOREHolly Smith writes in the Guardian
Added on 01/10/2025
There is nothing, it seems to me, more appalling, more deadening in the urban landscape than a uniform mass of low buildings covering acres and acres … High dwellings – I think, really very high dwellings – are an enormous enhancement of the scene.”
READ MOREMrs Dalloway mention in the Guardian
Added on 27/09/2025
A trio of early stories by Virginia Woolf which together form a spoof biography of a family friend have been rediscovered and are set to be published next month.
READ MOREChasing the Pearl-Manuscript reviewed in the LRB
Added on 25/09/2025
At two o’clock in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was on fire.
READ MOREOrbán featured in the Economist
Added on 23/09/2025
The hard right is on the march in Europe. The Alternative for Germany, a party declared extremist by domestic spooks, scored a record result in a national election in February.
READ MORERichard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House reviewed in the Observer
Added on 21/09/2025
The Lovell Health House, completed in 1930, a composition of white planes miraculously poised over a steep slope near the Hollywood Hills, is the consummation of a love affair. On the one hand, there was the avant garde of central Europe, from where the house’s architect, Richard Neutra, came with an admiration for the industrial technology and can-do attitude of the United States.
READ MOREStoryteller reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 19/09/2025
The discriminating Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges once revealed his fondness for ‘hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson’ – a list that was quirky and eclectic, adjectives that neatly encapsulate Robert Louis Stevenson himself.
READ MOREBetween the Salt and the Ash reviewed in Church Times
Added on 19/09/2025
The poet and writer Jake Morris-Campbell was born in South Shields in 1988. My family came from a couple of miles to the north of there, on the other side of the River Tyne.
READ MOREAnn Pettifor writes in the Guardian
Added on 18/09/2025
Over a year into power, Starmer’s government is floundering – but it still has time on its side. In the first of a two-part series, our panelists recommend ways it can save itself
READ MOREFamily Romance reviewed in the LRB
Added on 17/09/2025
There are few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses.
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