News and reviews

Behind the Privet Hedge reviewed in the FT

Added on 13/06/2024

Edith Sitwell, aristo-poet and dreary snob, whose 17th-century ancestral home came with vast gardens and staff to tend them, once described working-class novelist DH Lawrence as looking like “a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden”. Then, as now, “suburban” is reserved for special horticultural disdain in Britain.

Solvable reviewed in Nature

Added on 12/06/2024

In Solvable, atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon describes how high-income countries, and the United States in particular, have repeatedly inflicted incredible amounts of damage on people and ecosystems. She relates the long and difficult struggles that concerned individuals — often from marginalized groups — faced in trying to convince governments to stop industries from destroying lives and the planet in the pursuit of profit.

God’s Scrivener reviewed in the TLS

Added on 07/06/2024

The American poet Jones Very (1813–80), subject of Clark Davis’s thorough and engaging God’s Scrivener, is generally remembered as a curious secondary figure in the Transcendentalist movement.

The Point of the Needle reviewed in the TLS

Added on 07/06/2024

Barbara Burman became interested in the stitch “as perhaps one of the smallest things a historian could think about” during research for her book The Pocket: A hidden history of women’s lives, 1660–1900, written with Ariane Fennetaux (2019).

Unsuitable reviewed in the Guardian

Added on 06/06/2024

When it comes to lesbians, clothes can really shape our place in the world,” says the fashion historian Eleanor Medhurst. “They can let us be recognised by others in our community, or allow us to be hidden to the world at large.”

Round Our Way reviewed in Prospect

Added on 05/06/2024

Sam Hanna was one of the most prolific English filmmakers of the 20th century. His work spanned six decades. He made 270 documentary films. Have you heard of him?

Born in Burnley in 1903, Hanna left school at the age of 12 to work in a cotton mill, turned to furniture design and cabinetmaking, and then became a woodwork teacher. His colleagues looked down on the subject—too manual, too vocational—and didn’t let him share the staff room.

The Truth About Empire extract in the Guardian

Added on 05/06/2024

In 2021, Oliver Dowden, the then culture secretary, appeared at the History Matters conference organised by the rightwing Policy Exchange thinktank. He had recently urged museum curators not to “denigrate” British history, as if history were a fixed, fragile thing, akin to a faltering tower of Jenga, and not something complex, changing and robust, with fresh discoveries and new arguments forever changing our sense of it.

Battle for the Museum reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/06/2024

This is a brave book, fluently written, at times almost in a torrent, about what Rachel Spence dubs ‘Planet Art’. It gives a convincing account of the ‘global expansion which, over the last half century, and much accelerated since the turn of the millennium, has driven the strategies of museums, auction houses, private galleries and art fairs’.

Dirty Real reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 01/06/2024

In 1967, the unexpected worldwide success of Bonnie and Clyde blindsided the Hollywood film industry, which then spent the next half decade attempting to adapt to the changing tastes of the new youth audience it had apparently captured. No matter that the picture took a pair of vicious, sociopathic thrill-killers who in real life were about as appealing as the Manson family and reinvented them as glamorous Robin Hood figures, there was obviously money to be made, and the studios wanted a slice of it.

The First Cold War reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 31/05/2024

This scholarly, often original and always readable study of British and Russian relations in the 19th century is based primarily on diplomatic correspondence and records of ministries of foreign affairs, and secondarily on press sources and private archives. The book begins with chapters tracing the first encounters between Russia and England in the 16th century.

Gujarat Under Modi reviewed in the TLS

Added on 31/05/2024

At the dawn of the twenty-first century India’s intellectual classes professed a cautious optimism – verging at times on self-congratulation – about the nation’s tryst with democracy. For many, the unruly coalition governments of the late 1990s and early 2000s reflected the deepening of democratic norms and a shared commitment to the peaceful transfer of power.

Battle for the Museum reviewed in the Standard

Added on 31/05/2024

In theory, I should like this book. It’s about the corruption of what Rachel Spence calls Planet Art, that, is museums and galleries, and there’s a lot of it about. It extends from the grossly inflated prices given to rubbish artefacts at auction, to the use of cultural philanthropy to elevate the social importance of controversial individuals such as Len Blavatnik and the Sackler family.