News and reviews

The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 15/07/2025

In May 1945, the youth club of St Anne’s Church in Kew constructed a huge pile of dried wood on the nearby cricket green in preparation for the announcement of VE Day. When Churchill declared victory, the young people of the church paraded a full-size effigy of Adolf Hitler to the green and placed it on top of the pyre, whereupon the vicar, my predecessor, conducted a ceremonial burning, personally setting the whole thing alight.

Our Little Gang reviewed in the Observer

Added on 13/07/2025

In the early 20th century, the race to stake a claim to the future of art was as furious as the scramble for Africa a generation earlier. Its colonising pioneers came from all over Europe, guided by feverish dreams of glory. Picasso carved out a path to cubism and helped himself to indigenous cultures. A group of Italians, roped together by quasi-fascist ideology, penetrated deep into futurism.

The Dream Factory reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 11/07/2025

Pub quiz masters with a taste for William Shakespeare are spoiled for choice when it comes to red letter years. The playwright’s birth and death, the building and burning down of the Globe, and the publication of the First Folio (1564, 1616, 1599, 1613, 1623) are all dates that sit dustily in the corners of many of our brains, ready to be summoned when trivia duty calls.

The Fall reviewed in the LRB

Added on 10/07/2025

Few places​ celebrated the Restoration in 1660 with more enthusiasm than Sherborne in Dorset. It was late May, and crowds piled into the tight streets of the ancient castle town. Wine flowed and hogsheads of beer and baskets of white bread were put out for the poor.

Work Won’t Love You Back mention in the Guardian

Added on 10/07/2025

Our wall planner is pinned on to a large cork board in the kitchen. Structured month by month in rows, it is parma violet, coral pink and butter yellow, and huge – a good metre long, almost the size of the table beneath it.

Leila Aboulela wins PEN Pinter Prize 2025 feature in the Guardian

Added on 09/07/2025

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

Small Earthquakes featured in BBC Travel’s ‘Six Upcoming Summer Travel Books’

Added on 04/07/2025

In Small Earthquakes journalist and travel writer Shafik Meghji traverses landscapes from the Atacama Desert to Tierra del Fuego and Easter Island to South Georgia to reveal the overlooked yet profound – and profoundly enduring – connections between Britain and Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

What Does It Mean to Be Kazakhstani? reviewed in the TLS

Added on 04/07/2025

Kazakh, Tatar, Russian, Uyghur, Polish, German, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Chechen, Korean, Armenian – this far from exhaustive list gives an inkling of the ethnic complexity created by Kazakhstan’s history of pastoral nomadism, Russian imperial conquest and colonization, followed by famine, forced sedentarization, mass deportations and Gulag incarceration.

Lynne Jones writes in the Guardian

Added on 02/07/2025

In 1983, along with thousands of other women, I cut down sections of the fence around RAF Greenham Common, which was to house nuclear weapons in the form of cruise missiles.

Horace reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 02/07/2025

Horace lived in turbulent times. He was born in 65 BC and died in 8 BC, a period that saw Rome’s frightening transition from republic to empire. As Peter Stothard makes clear in this wonderful biography of the poet, this was a time of assassinations, suicides, civil war and confiscations.

John Singer Sargent reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/07/2025

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-­Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his childhood friend Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts.

Family Romance reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/07/2025

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-­Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his childhood friend Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts.