News and reviews

Negotiating With the Devil reviewed in the TLS

Added on 28/06/2024

Should governments talk to terrorists? Should war criminals be included in dialogue? When trying to bring peace, should we “negotiate with the devil”? In this short and elegant new book, Pierre Hazan tackles the moral dilemmas that face would-be mediators.

Waste and the Wasters reviewed in the TLS

Added on 28/06/2024

Eleanor Johnson’s Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and ecosystemic thought in medieval England is a moving and powerful study of neglect and ecological damage as reflected in the literature of the Middle Ages. Medieval people have a lot to teach us about waste, Johnson argues. They understood it and they were frightened of it – and so should we be.

The Tyne Bridge reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 27/06/2024

Paul Brown explores the history and significance of the Tyne Bridge, arguably Tyneside’s greatest industrial achievement, and one of many attractions that draws visitors from around the world to the city of Newcastle.

Spycraft reviewed in Historia

Added on 25/06/2024

Early modern Europe was a hotbed of espionage, where spies, spy-catchers, and conspirators pitted their wits against each other in deadly games of hide and seek. Theirs was a dangerous trade — only those who mastered the latest techniques would survive.

The Last Sane Woman reviewed in the Observer

Added on 23/06/2024

The title of Hannah Regel’s assured debut novel presumably alludes to Angela Carter’s description of the potter Michael Cardew as “the last sane man in a crazy world”. Two of Regel’s three female characters are aspiring ceramicists. Neither achieve Cardew’s fame. The Last Sane Woman is a study in artistic endeavour, disappointment and envy.

Normandy reviewed in Aspects of History

Added on 22/06/2024

When one thinks of D-Day, June 6th 1944, the first images that spring to mind are of brave soldiers disembarking landing craft and rushing onto the beaches to face the machine-guns of the defending Germans. Films, such as Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day have enhanced those images.

Serbia reviewed in the TLS

Added on 21/06/2024

Serbia is modern Europe’s odd man out. Today, this small Balkan country sits comfortably outside the European Union and NATO, at a time when nearly every other European country is either a member or aspiring member of both. Its people would seemingly sooner be engulfed by the institutional West than ever be a part of it.

The Abiy Project extract in The Guardian

Added on 20/06/2024

I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about Abiy Ahmed.” The message flashed up from someone I had been told to call Napoleon. It was the middle of 2023, six years after I had first arrived in Ethiopia, and one year after I had left, in the midst of a war which was tearing it apart. Ethiopia was lurching from crisis to crisis, and behind each of them loomed one figure larger than any other: the prime minister, Abiy Ahmed.

Disordered Attention reviewed in ArtReview

Added on 17/06/2024

‘Attention’, in art historian Claire Bishop’s deft examination of post-1990s contemporary art, is in all kinds of trouble. That’s the result, in large part, of digital networks and the new culture of mediation, in which the space between reality, experience and image is collapsed via social media.

Welcome to the Club extract in the Idler

Added on 17/06/2024

It’s a balmy, Parisian evening in 2011, and I’ve been on one of my favourite walks past Père Lachaise, that grand city within a cemetery, to meet Gilles Peterson and friends at Mama Shelter. I had been living and DJ’ing in Paris for seven years and, call it loyalty or tradition, whenever Gilles was on the radio I emailed in for a shout out, and if he was in town, I made the trip to see him, Rob Gallagher, Sean Rollins and the Brownswood record label crew.

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/06/2024

Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Serbia reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 14/06/2024

Serbia is a wounded country. Its past overflows with legends of gallant resistance and glorious triumph. Yet Serbian nationalism is animated by the grievances of defeat. The Turks conquered and degraded it. NATO bombed it. The European Union spurns it. Serbia’s neighbors, from Croatia to Hungary, have been accepted into Europe; Serbia, however, continues to be stigmatized as the instigator of World War I and memorialized as the cause of the last genocide on European soil in the 20th century.