News and reviews

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/04/2025

More than 300 years before Apollo 11, the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a science-fiction fantasy, Somnium, in which a mother and son journey to the Moon and describe the appearance of the Earth from there, complete with observed “phases” akin to the Moon’s own.

Turner and Constable reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/04/2025

Frank Auerbach was right: “There isn’t a Turner that doesn’t somehow fly and there isn’t a Constable that doesn’t burrow.” J. M. W. Turner appears to have seen the world from midair: as viewers of his paintings, we can feel suspended in vortices of swirling wind, snow or smoke.

Scholars and Their Kin reviewed in History Today

Added on 04/04/2025

In an inexplicable moment of synchronicity, this book was brought to my attention as I was drafting an abstract for a conference about my father. A year ago, the idea that I would be developing a scholarly talk about my dad would have been unthinkable.

As I Please … reviewed in the Tribune

Added on 03/04/2025

S0metimes you don’t know what you’ve got till you take another look in the store cupboard. A new collection of Martin Rowson’s writings for Tribune opens up a treasure trove of caustically acerbic railings against the wrongs of the world, especially targeting the ‘craven, incompetent, cruel and callous clowns that lead us’.

The Return of the Housewife reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 03/04/2025

Emma Casey’s book, The Return of the Housewife, exposes yet another example of how social media is being used to misinform and manipulate. A reader in sociology at the University of York, Casey strips bare TikTok, Instagram, other digital sources flooded with images of “cleanfluencers” — women cleaning, tidying, putting things right, and linked to the concept of a life of love, contentment, self-care and positive thinking.

Normandy reviewed in the LRB

Added on 03/04/2025

In June 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops.

Josephine Baker’s Secret War reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 03/04/2025

Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the time, however, it just looked like a heady cocktail of comedy, exoticism and sex.

The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 03/04/2025

Among the most striking things about Tony Benn was his friendship with Enoch Powell. They entered the House together in 1950 and became regular presenters on The Week in Westminster before falling out over ‘rivers of blood’ and then making up. For Benn, politicians were ‘weathercocks’ or ‘signposts’, and Powell, like himself, was the latter.

Islamesque reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 31/03/2025

Few architectural styles are as familiar to European eyes as the Romanesque. Although there are many different regional variations, you are never very far from an identifiably Romanesque building, no matter where you live. Most of us can probably pick out the essential characteristics: rounded arches, massive walls and so on – all things that we associate with the legacy of Rome. But is it really as ‘European’ as it seems?

Vanessa Bell featured in the Guardian

Added on 31/03/2025

When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every available surface in blazing hues; or the famous phrase about their unorthodox sex lives – they “painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

Burying the Enemy featured in the Guardian

Added on 29/03/2025

For some, tending the graves was an act of reconciliation. For others, it was about acknowledging shared losses and shared grief.

Thousands of Germans who died in Britain during the first and second world wars were laid to rest in local graveyards. British people tended these graves for decades, even laying flowers and wreaths for their former foes.

Saudi Arabia reviewed in the TLS

Added on 28/03/2025

To those of us who have lived and worked there, it is simply “the Kingdom”. On first arrival, the experience can be unsettling. There are so many clichés about Saudi Arabia that to find an actual place, inhabited by human beings with recognizably human feelings, can almost be a shock.