News and reviews
The Price is Wrong reviewed in the London Review of Books
Added on 04/04/2024
The words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’.
READ MOREIn the Service of the Shogun reviewed in History Today
Added on 04/04/2024
In 1600 a Dutch galleon arrived on the shores of a small fief on Kyushu, the westernmost of Japan’s four main islands. It was the first Dutch ship to reach Japan. Among the crew was an English navigator, William Adams, who managed to gain the trust of Tokugawa Ieyasu, a powerful warlord who became a shogun (the military leader of the samurai caste) in 1603.
READ MOREHans Kundnani writes in the Jacobin
Added on 02/04/2024
During the last decade, and especially since 2016, there has been a widespread tendency to view both domestic and international politics in an extraordinarily simplistic way.
READ MORE44 Days in Prague reviewed in the Literary Review
Added on 01/04/2024
In the summer of 1938, the attention of the world was focused on the state of Czechoslovakia. At issue was what to many seemed a deeply moral question of whether democracy or dictatorship would prevail there. The country was suddenly awash with British visitors – politicians, journalists and curious tourists.
READ MOREThe English Soul reviewed in the Oldie
Added on 01/04/2024
As a boy in the 1760s, William Blake looked up and saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’. That was at Peckham Rye in south London, on one of his solitary walks. Peter Ackroyd, himself haunted by the spirit of London, doesn’t mention that a mural occupying the whole side of a house there, to commemorate the event, was painted in 1993, only to be vandalised three years later.
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