News and reviews

The Mack reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 20/10/2024

On 23 May 2014, a fire broke out in the Mackintosh Building of the Glasgow School of Art, destroying its library. The loss to the Mack, as it’s generally known, Glasgow’s most famous building and possibly the greatest creation of its principal designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, elicited tributes and sympathy from around the world.

Analog Superpowers featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

Shortly before the First World War, two British inventors developed an analogue computer that enabled battleships to fire with unprecedented accuracy. Their breakthrough was promptly pirated by the British and US navies and the ensuing lawsuits were rebuffed with the claim of “national security”. Katherine C Epstein’s narrative positions this as the birth of the security state.

Overshoot featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

The commitment to limiting the global temperature rise to 1.50C is, say the authors of this sobering account of “how the world surrendered to climate breakdown”, wavering. A fatalism has intruded which holds that the limit will be overshot. Capital, especially in the guise of the fossil fuel industry and those who pander to it, is the main culprit. According to Malm and Carton, there is hope – but it is fading.

The Story of Drawing featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

In this history of the graphic arts from pre-history to the present, Susan Owens argues that drawing has always been more than a mere preparatory stage in the creation of paintings. It is, she says, the key element of art. As the medium free from the influence of patrons and public, paper has been the place where artists have been best able to express themselves.

Bedsit Land featured in the New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

The DJ and music journalist Patrick Clarke looks at the trajectory of Soft Cell, the 1980s pop-synth duo of Marc Almond and David Ball. Through more than 60 interviews, including with the duo themselves, he puts together a full and breezy account of their career and the influences – from Soho to post-Franco Spain – behind songs such as their “Tainted Love” reboot and “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye”.

Einstein and the Quantum Revolutions featured in New Statesman

Added on 16/10/2024

The French Nobel laureate Alain Aspect explains there has been not just one quantum revolution but two. The second is ongoing, with the results being felt in areas such as computing and communications. This, says Aspect, is the science of the future; the full potential of “entangled particles” which interact at distance is still unfolding.

The Malleus Maleficarum reviewed in the TLS

Added on 11/10/2024

The Malleus Maleficarum is a medieval inquisition document, written in Latin by the fifteenth-century German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer (under the name Henricus Institoris) and now republished in an updated translation by Peter Maxwell-Stuart. Like many medieval manuscripts it is a compilation: it contains a disquisition on the nature of magic, a series of mirabilia (marvellous anecdotes) and a practical legal handbook.

Soviet Factography reviewed in the TLS

Added on 11/10/2024

The Soviet Union in the 1920s was, in the words of the pioneering nonfiction film-maker Dziga Vertov, a “factory of facts”. Reality itself was in a state of revolution: a state that had been ravaged by war and upheaval was in the throes of modernization, throwing up new experiences and information at a dizzying rate.

The Enlightenment and Original Sin reviewed in the TLS

Added on 11/10/2024

Matthew Kadane disarmingly describes his new book as an “intellectual history of nobodies”. Its protagonist is the splendidly named Pentecost Barker, born in Plymouth in 1690, the son of devoutly religious parents, who followed his father into the wine trade, but had an unfortunate habit of getting high on his own supply.

Money In Art reviewed in the Daily Mail

Added on 11/10/2024

Throughout history, what has been the power behind the throne? Money, of course! Spanning thousands of years, this fascinating book tracks the influence money has had through art.

A Man With No Title reviewed in the Observer

Added on 06/10/2024

In a recent interview, French Algerian novelist Xavier Le Clerc said he feels otherness in his bones. When his father died in 2020, he decided to tell his story, from his brutal upbringing in northern Algeria and harsh existence during the Algerian war to raising a family in France. His father was illiterate and rarely spoke of his experiences, so Le Clerc imagines much of his past.

Clyde Walcott reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/10/2024

We may some day be able to answer Tolstoy’s exasperated and exasperating question: What is art? – but only when we learn to integrate our vision of Walcott on the back foot through the covers with the outstretched arm of the Olympic Apollo.” C. L. R. James’s case in Beyond a Boundary for cricket to be acknowledged as “a dramatic spectacle”, essential to the history of the Caribbean, memorably draws on the image of Clyde Walcott at the crease.