News and reviews

Modernism reviewed in the TLS

Added on 14/11/2025

One of the difficulties of talking about modernism is grasping that will-o’-the-wisp, the modern. How can cultural innovations be the latest thing when they’re always, by definition, becoming obsolete? In what sense is a set of century-old artistic experiments still modern?

Arthur Schopenhauer reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 13/11/2025

According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), people prefer reading books about great thinkers rather than by the thinkers themselves because ‘like is attracted to like and the shallow, tasteless gossip of a contemporary pinhead is more agreeable and convenient to them than the thoughts of great minds’.

It Started in Damascus reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 11/11/2025

Rime Allaf takes the long view of Syria’s descent into hell. Her story begins with President Hafez al Assad, the architect of the socialist Baathist dictatorship that, from 1970 to 2000, immiserated and impoverished an entire nation before his son and successor Bashar utterly destroyed it.

A Historian in Gaza featured in the Guardian

Added on 11/11/2025

A historian who spent more than a month in Gaza at the turn of the year says he saw “utterly convincing” evidence that Israel supported looters who attacked aid convoys during the conflict.

Tradecraft reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 10/11/2025

Suppose you are an aid worker, or a journalist, or a lawyer of some kind, whose work has left you with outstanding expertise in some far-flung demimonde. One day you get a message saying that David Cornwell – you might know him by the name John le Carré – is writing a book set in your part of the world. He needs an expert to help him get the fine detail right. Can he take you out for lunch?

Tradecraft mentioned in the Spectator

Added on 07/11/2025

When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his papers, he got more than he could ever have bargained for. Le Carré not only responded with enthusiasm, explaining that ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine’, but also sent along 85 boxes of neatly arranged papers and memorabilia.

Tattoos reviewed in the LRB

Added on 06/11/2025

I didn’t plan my first tattoo. A few weeks after my mother died, I was in Mexico City in a bar owned by a female mezcal maker with whom I was having an ill-advised fling. There were only a few people there, including the tattoo artist from the studio upstairs. He had his kit with him, and as the evening wore on, and the mezcal continued to flow, people began inking ‘Oaxaca’ on one another.

Up in the Air reviewed/Book of the Day in the New Statesman

Added on 05/11/2025

There are few, if any, forms of dwelling so thick with ideological, political and aesthetic baggage as the high-rise block. For the political right, the usual story, firmly set with the publication of Alice Coleman’s eviscerating book Utopia on Trial in 1985, is one of abject failure.

Madam War Criminal reviewed in the Observer

Added on 05/11/2025

In October 2002, Biljana Plavšić, biologist and former president of Republika Srpska, made history. The “Iron Lady of the Balkans”, as Madeleine Albright called her, was judged by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to be guilty of persecution – a crime against humanity. Plavšić became the first woman ever to be convicted by an international criminal tribunal.

Katherine Mansfield reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 04/11/2025

Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’.

Republic and Empire reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/11/2025

The central theme of Republic and Empire is the imperial character of the American Revolution. The Navigation Acts Britain imposed on the American colonies to help pay for the Seven Years’ War (1756–63); the military support France and Spain gave to Washington’s Continental Army; the experience of Canada, Ireland, Jamaica and the West Indies relative to that of the American colonists; the guns, rifles and ammunition from France and the Austrian Netherlands that American ships purchased from Dutch St Eustatius; and the ramifications of chattel slavery throughout the British Empire – all of these factors affected why and how the revolution unfolded.

The White Lady reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 01/11/2025

We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is.