News and reviews

Act Now reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 02/08/2024

What an incredibly timely book this is. The authors, featuring Kate Pickett, Richard Wilkinson and Danny Dorling, are a collective of leading figures from academia, politics and industry who share a common belief in the need for pragmatic reform to end our crisis.

Thank You Mr Crombie reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 02/08/2024

Journalist Mihir Bose has produced a fascinating book chronicling his life: growing up in India, then moving to Britain, where he eventually works his way into journalism.

Letters Around A Garden reviewed in the TLS

Added on 26/07/2024

In Switzerland’s Rhône Valley, nestled in a landscape of vineyards, orchards and meadows, stands the Château de Muzot – a small fortified manor dating back to the thirteenth century. In the early 1920s this quadrangular two-storey structure, topped with a stepped gable roof, was purchased and restored by an affluent philanthropist, Werner Reinhart. Thanks to Reinhart’s patronage, it is here that Rainer Maria Rilke retreated in the aftermath of the First World War.

The Dreadful History and Judgement of God on Thomas Müntzer reviewed in Church Times

Added on 26/07/2024

Who was Thomas Müntzer, asks Andrew Drummond. Was he, as Martin Luther suggested, a “ravening wolf”, a “false prophet” who stirred up rebellion and bloodshed? (Each chapter opens with a juicy piece of invective by a member of Luther’s Wittenberg team). Or was Müntzer, as his admirers have suggested, a hero of the downtrodden, a harbinger of spiritual, social, and political equality?

The Gulag Doctors reviewed in the TLS

Added on 26/07/2024

Fifty years ago the writer and former prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested by the KGB, stripped of his citizenship and deported from the Soviet Union. He had been charged with treason, but his principal crime was to have authorized the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in Paris some months earlier. As a reviewer wrote in these pages under the heading “The country of Gulag” (TLS, February 22, 1974), Solzhenitsyn’s book would “survive as one of the bravest and finest of mankind’s bequests to posterity”.

Paul Foot reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 25/07/2024

Not long before he died in 2004, Paul Foot wrote an obituary of his friend Tony Cliff, with whom he worked for many years on the Socialist Worker. “Of all the awful crimes of the left, none infuriated Cliff like passivity. For people who knew the world was rotten, to sit back and do nothing about it was for him the ultimate aberration.”

Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England: Staffordshire review – Observer

Added on 21/07/2024

In the 1940s, a refugee from Nazi Germany called Nikolaus Pevsner started travelling round the lanes and streets of England, armed with sheaves of notes compiled in advance from lengthy research, cataloguing the noteworthy structures in meticulous-going-on-obsessive detail. It was an outsider’s act of love for his adopted country, a homage to the recently imperilled heritage of a nation that had survived war.

Behind the Privet Hedge reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 20/07/2024

Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in 1916.

44 Days In Prague reviewed in the TLS

Added on 19/07/2024

On August 3, 1938, the British mediator Walter Runciman arrived in Prague tasked with solving a seemingly intractable problem. When Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918 it included the Sudetenland, a band of territory along the border with Germany where three million Germans lived. Now the Sudetens, encouraged by the rise of Nazism, were demanding legal and territorial autonomy.

The Specter of the Archive

Added on 19/07/2024

Nicholas Popper’s book opens with William Bowyer, Elizabethan keeper of the records in the Tower of London, reorganizing governmental records and making them more easily retrievable. There followed a great growth in the quantity of government archive materials in the Tower and beyond, which has been sustained pretty continuously ever since. In fact, a century later, Joseph Williamson, a secretary of state and Charles II’s “information master”, based his influence on command of this mass of written records.

A Twist in the Tail reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 19/07/2024

The anchovy is the Marmite of the aquatic world. Love it or hate it, neutrality isn’t an option. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, found them repulsive. Horace was pithier: “They stink.” But Christopher Beckman, horror film producer turned food historian, swears by them. A Twist in the Tail is his delightful tribute to this diminutive fish.

John Bowers writes in Prospect

Added on 18/07/2024

The last few years has seen a major decline in public standards. Together, a generation of fast revolving ministers have disfigured public life, and the scandals of wallpapergate, Pinchergate, partygate and others have tainted parliament and government.