News and reviews

How the Spanish Empire Was Built reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 26/04/2024

“The world’s most successful empires have been engineers’ creations.” This assertion, made by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo in “How the Spanish Empire Was Built: A 400-Year History,” seems bold at first, almost audacious. Yet within the span of the book’s first two chapters, the authors’ contention seems not only logical and wise but almost irrefutable.

Tom Haines-Doran writes in the Guardian

Added on 26/04/2024

Is there any hope for Britain’s beleaguered rail passengers? We have some of the highest fares in Europe, industrial relations are at an all-time low, and cancellations and delays bedevil the network. Britain’s railways are fractured, rudderless and without clear purpose or plan.

The Front Room reviewed in the LSE

Added on 25/04/2024

Migration, at its most basic level, means a physical relocation. However, this “mobility” entails a complex, polysemous reality whose consequences reverberate for those who leave one place for another. Michael McMillan’s The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home presents a poignant personal tale of materiality, memory and diasporic emotions.

Women in Intelligence reviewed in the Standard

Added on 23/04/2024

A subject that has been touched on in the cinematic world, Helen Fry plunges into the secret history of female intelligence professionals during both World Wars. From running sophisticated espionage networks and the administrative excellence of the women at Bletchley and Whitehall to landing parachutes behind enemy lines, Fry puts the oft-forgotten female heroes at the forefront of her revisionist history.

Against Landlords reviewed in the Observer

Added on 23/04/2024

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the housing crisis could be solved without building any more homes? There would be no carbon emissions from construction sites, no green fields covered over, no householders upset at dwellings appearing in their view.

Balance of Power reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 22/04/2024

Bring back the gold standard? Not on your life, economists reply with nearly one voice. Nor is the Paris-based Éric Monnet a dissenter from the academic consensus. His “Balance of Power: Central Banks and the Fate of Democracies” is a resounding defense of the Ph.D. standard of monetary organization.

Dethroned reviewed in the TLS

Added on 19/04/2024

Every year, at the end of October, India observes National Unity Day, celebrating the integration of the separate territories of the colonial period into one unified nation. Not everyone joins in. Last year a separate “felicitation event” took place in Ahmedabad, where thirty former princes gathered to lament the sacrifice of their dynasties – within a few years of the British leaving India in 1947, more than 560 princely states lost their independence as the new republic emerged.

CS Lewis’s Oxford featured in the Observer

Added on 14/04/2024

CS Lewis and John Betjeman had a famously strained relationship. While the Chronicles of Narnia author dismissed his then-student at Oxford as an “idle prig”, the future poet laureate went on to thank, in the preface of one of his collections, “Mr CS Lewis for the fact on page 256” – even though the book had only 45 pages.

The New Politics of Poland reviewed in the TLS

Added on 12/04/2024

Last October a broad liberal coalition led by Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council, took Europe by surprise when it ousted Poland’s national-populist Law and Justice (PiS) party from power after eight years in charge. Newspapers trumpeted the country’s “return to Europe” as liberals looked to Tusk’s victory for a “blueprint” on how to turn back the tide of populism.

Tangled Paths reviewed in the TLS

Added on 12/04/2024

The world in which this biography opens saw itself on the edge of a nervous breakdown, driven to distraction by technology, the pressure of work and chemical stimulants, provoking an epidemic of mental health problems that in the case of our subject led to severe paranoia regarding viral infections.

Audubon as Artist reviewed in the Wall Street Journal

Added on 12/04/2024

John James Audubon (1785-1851) is a much-studied personality, his journals and writings giving historians such tasty fodder that it might seem difficult to present a fresh view of this unruly genius. Roberta Olson lives and breathes Audubon in the New-York Historical Society’s climate-controlled chambers, where all of his original paintings are housed in her care as curator of drawings emerita.

All Mapped Out reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 10/04/2024

What are maps? Who uses them and for what purposes? For anyone who feels these questions are too simplistic to engage with, then reading Mike Duggan’s exhaustive deconstruction of the concept of mapping will never look at a map in the same way again.