News and reviews

44 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.

The 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.