News and reviews

The Holy Innocents reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

Miguel Delibes worked as a journalist and novelist throughout Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). He was forced to resign as editor of the Valladolid daily newspaper El norte de Castilla in 1963. The authorities detested his journalistic campaigns against rural poverty. In 1981, with Spain now a democracy, he poured decades of experience and anger into The Holy Innocents, an intense novel set twenty years earlier.

Small Earthquakes reviewed in the TLS

Added on 08/08/2025

Growing up in south London, Shafik Meghji was transported to South America by books and comics. Now, years later in Buenos Aires, it feels as if he’s back home, what with the weather, “the English-language Buenos Aires Herald on the newsstands, a shuttered Harrods store on the main shopping strip, the nearby Richmond café”.

The New Politics of Poland featured in the Guardian

Added on 05/08/2025

We were travelling across Poland by train the day after the country’s sensational parliamentary elections in autumn 2023. When news of the results came through, passengers in our compartment fell into each other’s arms, rejoicing as though a great weight had been lifted from their shoulders.

Ambigrammia featured in the Guardian

Added on 04/08/2025

The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It reviewed in Church Times

Added on 01/08/2025

This book is accessible, interesting, well-priced, and puzzling. As Professor Alec Ryrie acknowledges frankly, both in the book itself and in an excellent Church Times podcast (4 July 2025), he is straying well outside his specialist area of Reformation history by offering a unique take on post-war British culture.

Horace reviewed in the TLS

Added on 01/08/2025

Poet on a Volcano might seem a strange choice of title for the biography of a poet whose Odes were described by George Meredith as “the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants” or “gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape”.

Abortion reviewed in the TLS

Added on 01/08/2025

Birth rates are falling in countries across the world, including the US and the UK, as fewer women are willing to raise the number of children their leaders believe are needed to sustain society’s economic growth, demographic stability, even national identity.

Blind Corners reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/08/2025

Michael Collins begins Blind Corners, a book of essays on photography, with a careful study of a picture most people wouldn’t look at twice. It is a group photo of about one hundred people in a small town in Wales in 1953. Collins describes how he found a negative of the image in a moribund photo studio and restored and printed it with the aid of a high-definition scanner.

Type Designers of the Twentieth Century reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/08/2025

Publishing used to be a dirty business. I’m talking not only about the ink-stained fingers of disreputable writers, but also about the filthy hands of those who actually put the words on the page: the devils and cutters who worked with metal type.

Awake! reviewed in Church Times

Added on 01/08/2025

This is a compelling and timely book. It is compelling, because the reader shares Mark Vernon’s sense of excitement as he delves deeper and deeper into William Blake’s imaginative world and the way in which Blake’s visionary poetry also gives us vision: helps us see more deeply into the dilemmas and mysteries both of our own lives and the age in which we live.

The Medieval Moon reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 31/07/2025

‘The moon wanes and waxes, it is never steadfast’, wrote the author of Ancrene Wisse, a 13th-century guide for English anchoresses, ‘and signifies therefore worldly things that are as the moon ever changing.’ For anchorites immured in their cells, the moon represented everything they had rejected, the material pleasures and temptations they had overcome.

The Dream Factory reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 31/07/2025

It’s twenty years since James Shapiro published 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which fused literary criticism with political and social history in bravura fashion. Shapiro vigorously debunked the Romantic notion that Shakespeare was an artist who transcended his own era.