News and reviews

A Devilish Kind of Courage reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/05/2024

A few days before Christmas in 1910, a gang of Latvian anarchists (nobody knows exactly how many were involved) tried to tunnel their way into a jeweller’s shop on Houndsditch in London. Had they been successful they would have escaped with a haul worth, in today’s terms, more than a million pounds – money they could have used to fund the struggle against tsarist repression back home. Instead they were interrupted after a neighbour noticed the noise they were making.

Radio and the Performance of Government reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/05/2024

During the Nazi Protectorate in Czechoslovakia, which lasted from 1939 to 1945, every radio had a stiff red card slotted in front of its speaker. It showed that the radio had been inspected by an official and that its capacity to pick up shortwave broadcasts from overseas had been removed. The card also issued a threatening reminder: “Remember, remember, that listening to foreign radio is banned and punishable by prison or even death”.

Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism reviewed in Art Review

Added on 17/05/2024

We’ve all felt it. The urge to zoom-in, look-up, take a snapshot of or otherwise possess the world via the screen in front of us. The inalienable itch to get right to the heart of things without delay, to wholly absorb some relatively insignificant subfield of information right now.

Ian Garner writes in the Hub

Added on 15/05/2024

In May 1896, Nicholas II was crowned the last emperor of Russia in Moscow. An elaborately choreographed and opulent display hosted in a Kremlin cathedral affirmed that he was divinely ordained with absolute, autocratic power. Part man and part god. From that moment on, Nicholas was considered all but omnipotent.

Kafka: Making of an Icon reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 15/05/2024

When Franz Kafka died on 3 June 1924, he had published just a few collections of short prose, none of them to much acclaim. The majority of the writing for which he is now known and celebrated, such as the novels The Trial and The Castle, were left unfinished and published posthumously thanks to Kafka’s best friend, Max Brod, who defied Kafka’s instructions to burn the manuscripts.

Barbara Comyns reviewed in the TLS

Added on 10/05/2024

Readers have never known what to make of Barbara Comyns. The strange mixture of cheerful irreverence and raw misery in her writing makes it easy to dismiss her as a one-off eccentric or a battle-scarred version of Daisy Ashford. But her air of faux-naïf menace is not just a matter of personal peculiarity. It reflects the experience of a dislocated generation.

Barbara Comyns reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 09/05/2024

But you’ve killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’

Chaim Weizmann reviewed in the Jewish Chronicle

Added on 03/05/2024

For a people in large measure defined by history, with a culture that reveres great leaders, the relative obscurity of Chaim Weizmann is a mystery. Ask the average Jew on the Clapham (perhaps that should be Borehamwood) omnibus who should take the most credit for the founding of Israel and they’ll likely say Herzl or Ben-Gurion. Weizmann rarely gets a look in.

Aldus Manutius reviewed in the TLS

Added on 03/05/2024

In February 1497 the Aldine Press in Venice brought out the second volume of its great five-volume folio edition of Aristotle, one of the masterpieces of the swaddling-cloth era of print. On the last page, in both Greek and Latin, is a striking colophon: “Copy made in Venice by the metallic hand [manu stamnea] in the house of Aldus Manutius, Roman and scholar of the Greeks”.

American Imperialist reviewed in the TLS

Added on 03/05/2024

Born in Washington DC in 1864, Richard Dorsey Mohun grew up during the gilded age of US expansionism after the Civil War, when the emerging superpower engaged in acts of conquest and plunder across the world. Mohun personified this postbellum imperial violence, and Arwen P. Mohun, his great-granddaughter, brings his story to life in this compelling new volume.

Mihir Bose writes in the Guardian

Added on 30/04/2024

I thought I knew Britain in 1969, when I came to this country from India to study at Loughborough University. But I quickly realised that was not the case. For me, the last half-century has been a long process of learning. At times this was very painful. Once, I even feared for my life at the hands of football racists. I have also seen the UK reinvent itself as a much more caring, welcoming place. However, we still have some way to go to become a truly diverse society.

Housing Atlas reviewed in Architecture Today

Added on 30/04/2024

It is hard to imagine a more opportune time in which to publish a compendium on housing, given our current escalating homelessness and our chronic maldistribution of wealth, both of which give an implicitly political significance to this encyclopaedic study.