News and reviews
44 Days In Prague reviewed in the TLS
Added on 19/07/2024
On August 3, 1938, the British mediator Walter Runciman arrived in Prague tasked with solving a seemingly intractable problem. When Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918 it included the Sudetenland, a band of territory along the border with Germany where three million Germans lived. Now the Sudetens, encouraged by the rise of Nazism, were demanding legal and territorial autonomy.
READ MOREThe Specter of the Archive
Added on 19/07/2024
Nicholas Popper’s book opens with William Bowyer, Elizabethan keeper of the records in the Tower of London, reorganizing governmental records and making them more easily retrievable. There followed a great growth in the quantity of government archive materials in the Tower and beyond, which has been sustained pretty continuously ever since. In fact, a century later, Joseph Williamson, a secretary of state and Charles II’s “information master”, based his influence on command of this mass of written records.
READ MOREA Twist in the Tail reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 19/07/2024
The anchovy is the Marmite of the aquatic world. Love it or hate it, neutrality isn’t an option. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, found them repulsive. Horace was pithier: “They stink.” But Christopher Beckman, horror film producer turned food historian, swears by them. A Twist in the Tail is his delightful tribute to this diminutive fish.
READ MOREJohn Bowers writes in Prospect
Added on 18/07/2024
The last few years has seen a major decline in public standards. Together, a generation of fast revolving ministers have disfigured public life, and the scandals of wallpapergate, Pinchergate, partygate and others have tainted parliament and government.
READ MOREBalzac’s Paris reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 17/07/2024
Eric Hazan, a lifelong Parisian who died in June, wrote several books about his hometown, with a particular focus on the class politics of the built environment. In Balzac’s Paris he revisits the 19th-century social geography of the French capital through the fiction of one of its most famous novelists.
READ MOREMihir Bose writes in the Guardian
Added on 17/07/2024
English football fans may never agree on Gareth Southgate’s footballing legacy, and will long debate whether he deprived the so-called golden generation of ending 58 years of hurt. But what cannot and should not be disputed is that Southgate has fundamentally reshaped England men’s football off the field.
READ MORESpycraft reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 13/07/2024
‘Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,/ Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff,/ Stink, and are thrown away.’ Ben Jonson likened his fellow secret agents to a tallow candle: a grotty necessity, to be discarded without regret.
READ MOREThe Afterlife of Data reviewed in Nature
Added on 12/07/2024
Printed books can immortalize the dead. But what should happen to posthumous online presence, asks political scientist Carl Öhman in his stimulating, sometimes spooky book.
READ MORESecond Chances reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 10/07/2024
Most of us vaguely remember encountering Marx’s pithy observation about history repeating itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Repetition can be absurd, the embarrassingly shallow and artificial effort to recreate what’s lost, or to appropriate the dramatic dignity of past events to clothe the naked triviality of what is currently going on.
READ MOREThink to New Worlds reviewed in Nature
Added on 08/07/2024
In March 2024, a mammoth review by the US Department of Defense concluded that there was “no evidence” that the US government had encountered alien life. Yet, that pronouncement is unlikely to have changed many minds.
READ MORELiberty’s Grid reviewed in History Today
Added on 07/07/2024
The Great American Grid was not designed to be practical. Instead, the straight lines and right angles were to represent something much more important: freedom. The grid’s instigator was Thomas Jefferson, who regarded the western United States as a tabula rasa for the revolution’s ideas of liberty.
READ MOREChina in Seven Banquets reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 06/07/2024
In February 1985 I had the good fortune to be a guest in Hong Kong at the Mandarin hotel’s 21st birthday celebration, a lavish three-day reconstruction of the sort of imperial banquet given during the Qing dynasty by the Kangxi emperor (1654-1722) and his grandson the Qianlong emperor (1711-1799).
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