News and reviews

A Twist in the Tail reviewed in the TLS

Added on 27/09/2024

For such small fish, anchovies pack a big punch. They can be eaten on their own or as part of almost any dish, from pasta sauces to vinaigrettes. Yet for every person who loves them there will be another for whom they provoke the deepest revulsion.

Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers featured in the Guardian

Added on 24/09/2024

Scholars have long suggested that Christopher Marlowe had a collaborator for the comic scenes of his classic play Doctor Faustus, although his name alone is on the 1604 published edition. Now a largely forgotten dramatist, Henry Porter, has emerged as the likely co-author, based on comparative linguistic evidence that has been unearthed from his surviving play.

The Story of Nature reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 14/09/2024

It is now almost a prerequisite of any dispute among environmentalists to recall a judgment offered by the literary critic Raymond Williams – that ‘nature’ is perhaps the most complex word in the English language. Attempts to unravel its meaning are fraught with challenge. Does it signify just the living elements of the biosphere, or does it include inanimate parts, such as mountains and rivers?

Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective featured in the Observer

Added on 08/09/2024

Some of the “searchers” were skilled at inspecting the clothes, hair and genitals of Victorian women and finding stolen money and pawn tickets for stolen goods. Others undertook risky sting operations, catching thieves and criminals red-handed and successfully testifying against them in court.

Endgame reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 05/09/2024

Jamie Merchant is media director for the Center for Progressive Strategy. He depicts the decline of capitalism, focusing on the US and British economies.

US real growth per head averaged 2.3 per cent from 1953 to 1973, 2 per cent from 1973 to 2007, and 0.7 per cent from 2007 to 2019. From 1950 to 1973, the world economy grew on average by 2.92 per cent per head, by 1.8 per cent from 1973 to 1990, then by 1.5 per cent, down to 1.2 per cent in 2019.

To Overthrow the World reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2024

There was a time, as Sean McMeekin reminds us, when public commentators were in near total-consensus. Communism had been tossed aside in eastern Europe in 1989. Two years later it met the same fate in the Soviet Union. In China the communist leadership was by then pursuing the benefits of capitalist economics. Governments actually committed to communism remained in only a few countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, and it seemed that the wheel of global history had turned irreversibly against it.

Jeffrey J Kripal interview in the Observer

Added on 01/09/2024

Jeffrey J Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of 10 books on the history of mysticism, psychology and the paranormal. His latest, How to Think Impossibly, draws on a range of sources including gnosticism, quantum physics and English romantic philosophy, to attempt a new theory of mind and the imagination.