News and reviews

Welcome to the Club extract in the Idler

Added on 17/06/2024

It’s a balmy, Parisian evening in 2011, and I’ve been on one of my favourite walks past Père Lachaise, that grand city within a cemetery, to meet Gilles Peterson and friends at Mama Shelter. I had been living and DJ’ing in Paris for seven years and, call it loyalty or tradition, whenever Gilles was on the radio I emailed in for a shout out, and if he was in town, I made the trip to see him, Rob Gallagher, Sean Rollins and the Brownswood record label crew.

John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/06/2024

Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Serbia reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 14/06/2024

Serbia is a wounded country. Its past overflows with legends of gallant resistance and glorious triumph. Yet Serbian nationalism is animated by the grievances of defeat. The Turks conquered and degraded it. NATO bombed it. The European Union spurns it. Serbia’s neighbors, from Croatia to Hungary, have been accepted into Europe; Serbia, however, continues to be stigmatized as the instigator of World War I and memorialized as the cause of the last genocide on European soil in the 20th century.

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.