News and reviews
Radicals reviewed in the TLS
Added on 26/06/2026
The history of the working class has held a perennial fascination for the British left, which becomes particularly intense when the Labour Party is in one of its perennial crises.
READ MORELady C reviewed in the TLS
Added on 26/06/2026
The story of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is so often a story of decorum, of what can and what can’t be written or said (and in front of whom). At the start of 1928, at the Swiss Alpine resort of Les Diablerets, where Aldous Huxley and his Belgian wife, Maria, were staying with Julian and Juliette Huxley and the D. H. Lawrences, Maria had been given the task of typing up the manuscript of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
READ MOREIran and the Revolution reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 26/06/2026
The year 1979 is the one of the seminal dates in modern political history. As one looks back over the last century of Middle Eastern history, it is more and more clear that the Islamic Revolution ranks with the French and Russian revolutions in its significance, not just to the region but also to the world.
READ MOREThe Arab Bureau reviewed in the TLS
Added on 26/06/2026
The title of this book immediately evokes the Arab Bureau’s impossibly colourful employees, among whom Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert would certainly have been the most obscure, especially as compared to his half-brother George, fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who funded the expedition that found the tomb of Tutankhamun, had he not been offered the throne of Albania. Twice.
READ MOREFolklore reviewed in the TLS
Added on 26/06/2026
What do these things have to do with one another? They are examples of the traditions, beliefs and practices of “the folk”, and hence are folklore, a category without any obvious further circumscription. In Folklore, Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook, two folklore studies academics, choose not to put many limits on their subject, other than geographical ones.
READ MOREA Passage to Europe reviewed in the TLS
Added on 26/06/2026
It was 1796. Revolutionary France was as much at war with itself as it was with nations beyond its borders, the Ottoman Empire was manoeuvring uneasily in response to new geopolitical pressures and, in India, the East India Company was tightening its grip, even as its nightmares were haunted by the formidable ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, whose summer palace proudly displayed a mechanical tiger that growled as it mauled a European soldier caught in its powerful claws.
READ MOREThe Masquerade reviewed in the London Review of Books
Added on 25/06/2026
Early in the first notebook of Jane Austen’s teenage writings is a work entitled ‘Jack and Alice: a novel’; it runs to a little over 5500 words and was probably written between 1789 and 1791.
READ MOREThe Breaking of the English Working Class featured in the Observer
Added on 22/06/2026
“I’m England till I die. I know I am, I’m sure I am, I’m England till I die!” Sandra Forsyth was almost 50 when she found her voice marching across Tower Bridge with several hundred supporters of the English Defence League. “Have you spoken to Mum lately?” her son Billy wrote to his sister Nicola from prison. “She’s turned into a fascist, lols.”
READ MOREThe Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 22/06/2026
As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. His discombobulation was telling.
READ MOREA Passage to Europe reviewed in the Daily Mail
Added on 14/06/2026
The next time you’re delayed for hours at an airport, or bumped off your flight and made to wait for 24 hours, spare a thought for Ahmad Khan. In the late 18th century, he set off as part of the entourage of three high-born sons of the deceased nawab (Muslim governor) of Broach (now Bharuch) in India, heading to London.
READ MOREThe Rest Is Silence reviewed in the TLS
Added on 12/06/2026
Those who hold that death is the permanent cessation of consciousness divide into opposing camps. On the one side are the petrified, for whom the prospect of the void induces an electric terror. On the other are those who fear untimely death, but cannot get worked up about the fact that life will end.
READ MOREManga reviewed in the TLS
Added on 12/06/2026
It is probably unfashionable these days to ascribe a particular artistic ability to an entire nation, but if you have ever enjoyed a written correspondence with Japanese friends, you will have noticed how often they begin doodling and illustrating in the middle of their sentences.
READ MORE