News and reviews
Bedlam reviewed in the Art Newspaper
Added on 30/09/2026
“My pictures describe me correctly,” Richard Dadd announces at the beginning of Jennifer Higgie’s Bedlam: A Novel. The declaration is seductive but invented. First published in 2006 and reissued to coincide with the exhibition Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam at the Royal Academy of Arts, Higgie’s novel imagines what the Victorian painter’s surviving archive cannot supply: an inner life.
READ MOREXiaolu Guo writes in the Guardian
Added on 29/09/2026
During the Tang dynasty, which lasted from the seventh to the early 10th century, Vikings were raiding the coasts of what today is called Europe. In the small archipelago now known as Britain, Anglo-Saxon kingdoms flitted by. Meanwhile, in Mesoamerica, after 3,000 years of flourishing, the Maya civilisation was collapsing.
READ MOREDebt and the Future of Workers reviewed in the LSE Review of Books
Added on 28/09/2026
Since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, a substantial literature has examined how financialisation has transformed inequalities, household balance sheets, and our everyday lives. Costas Lapavitsas’s Profiting Without Producing, my own book Commodity and David Harvey’s The Story of Capital exemplify this body of work, alongside books on household debt and social reproduction.
READ MOREHeather Buckingham writes in the Big Issue
Added on 28/09/2026
To build a future in which food banks are no longer needed is to build a future in which everyone can afford the essentials. And to build that future, we arguably need to build a future in which almost everyone can afford not just the essentials but a decent standard of living, almost all of the time.
READ MOREThe Best Science Stories and How They Work reviewed in Nature
Added on 25/09/2026
“It’s all too easy to misperceive science journalism as existing in a bubble,” writes science journalist Siri Carpenter, introducing her edited collection. It reprints 11 wide-ranging science articles by different writers, published across newspapers, magazines and journals, including Nature.
READ MOREForget Camus reviewed in the Morning Star
Added on 25/09/2026
There is something slightly odd about writing a book called Forget Camus. Albert Camus is one of those intellectuals who has become more than a writer. The absurd, the cigarette, the existentialist, the moral voice of post-war France. He has become an image, and so much so that the man himself can sometimes disappear behind the reputation.
READ MOREA Death of One’s Own extracted in the Tablet
Added on 24/09/2026
One might claim that the most accurate image of death is birth, which must feel to the baby like the loss of the whole world. Perhaps if we were less well schooled in sup pressing our feelings we would howl like a newborn infant on our deathbeds. It is as though at birth we are thrust out of an over powering plenitude, one which fits our flesh as snugly as an extra skin, into the inter minable abyss of the real.
READ MOREFallout reviewed in the London Review of Books
Added on 24/09/2026
Thirty-two years ago, in one of the last and least remembered crises of the 20th century, the United States came to the brink of war over the spread of nuclear weapons. Less than a year and a half into his first term, Bill Clinton was shown evidence that North Korea had removed fuel rods from a plutonium reactor, the first step towards creating the raw material for nuclear warheads.
READ MORETaj Ali writes in the Guardian
Added on 23/09/2026
There it was: a pool of blood spreading across the pavement. A section of the high street had been cordoned off and a uniformed police officer gestured for bystanders to move along. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and a racist murder had stunned Southall in west London.
READ MORETaj Ali writes in the Guardian
Added on 23/09/2026
There it was: a pool of blood spreading across the pavement. A section of the high street had been cordoned off and a uniformed police officer gestured for bystanders to move along. It was the long hot summer of 1976, and a racist murder had stunned Southall in west London.
READ MORESniff reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 12/09/2026
For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress.
READ MORESmell reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 12/09/2026
For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress.
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