News and reviews

The Maginot Line reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 22/08/2025

I don’t want to rain on the new Entente Amicale’s parade; it’s just that whenever we get cosy with the French, military disaster seems to follow.

Mihir Bose writes in the Guardian

Added on 20/08/2025

Are we, to echo Keir Starmer’s now infamous phrase, “an island of strangers”? No. But there is a deep cultural divide in this country, a cultural dissonance we don’t discuss but should. Witness the row about the Wythall Flaggers, the group that has erected numerous St George’s flags in the Worcestershire village to parade its patriotism. What does it mean?

Death to Order reviewed in the Mail on Sunday

Added on 18/08/2025

When it comes to the ‘exotic, tawdry, and very confusing’ subject of assassinations, there have been few lone wolves. Simon Ball’s exhaustive study shows that, behind every shot fired, there’s usually a complicated conspiracy.

Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript reviewed in the TLS

Added on 15/08/2025

Among the treasures of the British Library is an unassuming manuscript identified by the shelfmark MS Cotton Nero A.x/2. Named after its early-modern collector, Sir Robert Cotton, and the Roman emperor whose bust once sat atop its shelf in Cotton’s library, the manuscript is a little smaller than seven inches long and five inches wide, the size of a very small paperback.

Boccaccio reviewed in the TLS

Added on 15/08/2025

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron consists of 100 stories divided between ten narrators, all Florentines who have withdrawn to the countryside to hide out from the Black Death. The ninth tale told on the sixth day features Guido Cavalcanti, “one of the best logicians in the world and an excellent natural philosopher … a very elegant and cultivated man and very fluent in his speech”.

Dazzling Darkness reviewed in the TLS

Added on 15/08/2025

Why is Catholicism sexy again? The sudden surge in interest, especially among younger people, can be traced back to several sources. One is superficial, an aesthetic engagement: the Met Gala in 2018, where Rihanna wore a beaded minidress and papal tiara; or the “Hot Priest” in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, “only in it for the outfits”.

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 15/08/2025

Christian missionaries were central to European colonialism, providing a cloak of justice and moral authority, a model of “civilised” expansionism and colonial oversight of subjugated peoples. Governments, traders and explorers exploited this aura of ethical responsibility of Christian civilisation to the “heathen.” In England’s imperial adventures it was the Church of England that played a key role.

Central Europe reviewed in the TLS

Added on 15/08/2025

Imaginary places, as the Hungarian architect Ákos Moravánszky observed, are invested with strong identities. He gave the example of the Kingdom of Oz – it is a place that does not exist, but everyone knows how it differs from Kansas. Central Europe is another such place, a region that has no formal boundaries or definition, yet refuses stubbornly to disappear.

Boccaccio reviewed in the London Review of Books

Added on 14/08/2025

Histories of Italian literature begin with the Tre Corone or Three Crowns: Dante (1265-1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) and Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304-74), Boccaccio’s intimate friend. All three exalted the Italian vernacular but, to the puzzlement of modern readers, entrusted their most important philosophical works to Latin.

Phil Tinline writes in the New Statesman

Added on 13/08/2025

Last year, amid the riots that followed the Southport murders, the great sage Elon Musk prophesied that civil war in Britain was “inevitable”. So far, he’s been proved wrong, but then prophets can claim they’re just not correct yet. A year on, such talk has surged.

Émile Zola reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

The early reviews of Émile Zola’s twenty- volume “natural and social history” of the Rougon-Macquart family during Napoleon III’s Second Empire, published between 1871 and 1893, bristled with words such as “vulgar”, “indecent” and “coarse”. Henry James decried “the singular foulness of his imagination” and Anatole France declared that no writer had ever “raised such a heap of filth”.

Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

Between the spring of 1936 and February 1939, an unassuming pair of mews houses at 170–2 Warwick Road, in West Kensington, London, became the home of England’s only French art school, the Amédée Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts.