News and reviews

Dethroned reviewed in the TLS

Added on 19/04/2024

Every year, at the end of October, India observes National Unity Day, celebrating the integration of the separate territories of the colonial period into one unified nation. Not everyone joins in. Last year a separate “felicitation event” took place in Ahmedabad, where thirty former princes gathered to lament the sacrifice of their dynasties – within a few years of the British leaving India in 1947, more than 560 princely states lost their independence as the new republic emerged.

CS Lewis’s Oxford featured in the Observer

Added on 14/04/2024

CS Lewis and John Betjeman had a famously strained relationship. While the Chronicles of Narnia author dismissed his then-student at Oxford as an “idle prig”, the future poet laureate went on to thank, in the preface of one of his collections, “Mr CS Lewis for the fact on page 256” – even though the book had only 45 pages.

The New Politics of Poland reviewed in the TLS

Added on 12/04/2024

Last October a broad liberal coalition led by Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council, took Europe by surprise when it ousted Poland’s national-populist Law and Justice (PiS) party from power after eight years in charge. Newspapers trumpeted the country’s “return to Europe” as liberals looked to Tusk’s victory for a “blueprint” on how to turn back the tide of populism.

Tangled Paths reviewed in the TLS

Added on 12/04/2024

The world in which this biography opens saw itself on the edge of a nervous breakdown, driven to distraction by technology, the pressure of work and chemical stimulants, provoking an epidemic of mental health problems that in the case of our subject led to severe paranoia regarding viral infections.

Audubon as Artist reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 12/04/2024

John James Audubon (1785-1851) is a much-studied personality, his journals and writings giving historians such tasty fodder that it might seem difficult to present a fresh view of this unruly genius. Roberta Olson lives and breathes Audubon in the New-York Historical Society’s climate-controlled chambers, where all of his original paintings are housed in her care as curator of drawings emerita.

All Mapped Out reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 10/04/2024

What are maps? Who uses them and for what purposes? For anyone who feels these questions are too simplistic to engage with, then reading Mike Duggan’s exhaustive deconstruction of the concept of mapping will never look at a map in the same way again.

NATO reviewed in Aspects of History

Added on 09/04/2024

Readers may rightly wonder why NATO, so pre-eminent as Europe’s security foundation, is so timid in its response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. To fully grasp this, we need to look back to NATO’s perhaps greatest achievement, namely its ability to retool itself after the end of the Cold War and how its achievement continues to shape NATO policy today.

James Joyce and the Irish Revolution reviewed in the New Left Review

Added on 09/04/2024

When Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was first performed in London in 1955, the play had only been running for ten minutes or so when a member of the audience shouted ‘This is why we lost the colonies!’

Spinoza reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 09/04/2024

In December 2021, the philosopher Yitzhak Melamed posted on social media a letter that he had received from the rabbi of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. Melamed had written requesting permission to film there for a documentary on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who had been emphatically expelled by the 17th-century Jewish community.

Bloody Panico! mentioned in the Guardian

Added on 08/04/2024

For many people reading this, the analogy will seem ludicrous, but hear me out: if the Conservative party was one of your friends, you’d be very worried about them.

The Art Institution of Tomorrow excerpt in Artnet

Added on 06/04/2024

The world is in crisis, seeking a new direction in which to evolve with meaning and integrity—although it often does not seem this way. On the contrary, it may at first appear as if we are heading in precisely the opposite direction, where our experiences are hollow and communities divided.

Write Cut Rewrite reviewed in Nature

Added on 05/04/2024

The Bodleian Library in Oxford, UK, stores draft manuscripts, including one of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). The last line translates to “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, followed by his handwritten “Schluss!” (‘The End!’).