News and reviews

A Better Death reviewed in Church Times

Added on 01/05/2026

Side by side these two books appear counter-intuitive. The defender of legalised assisted dying is a well-known Jewish rabbi, whereas its strident adversary is a secular philosopher.

Converts reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 26/04/2026

One of the most common assumptions within the social science is that the more that societies grow, develop and industrialise the less religious and the more secular they will be. And in the initial decades of, say, the western industrialised nations there was a fair amount of evidence to support this as an overall thesis.

Murky Water reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 26/04/2026

Murky Water is a meticulously researched analysis of the state of the water industry in England and Wales, and outlines possible ways forward.

Archbishop, Chancellor, Kingmaker reviewed in Church Times

Added on 24/04/2026

Bishops come and go, “like snow upon the desert’s dusty face”, leaving little behind. Dunstans, Beckets, Cranmers, and Lauds are few and far between. This is also true of the later Middle Ages, when few but historians can think of a name, apart from the founders of Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

Ways of Telling reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 24/04/2026

In 2005 Xandra Bingley published Bertie, May and Mrs Fish, an extraordinarily lively and enjoyable memoir of her childhood on a Cotswold farm during the second world war. Much of the writing was glancing rather than straightforward, its narrative not strictly chronological, while its title hinted at something not fully explained in the text.

Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India reviewed in the LRB

Added on 23/04/2026

Being underestimated was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. Her earliest talent was for invisibility. To the men who surrounded her father, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she was a gloomy, awkward girl.

Ways of Telling reviewed in the Tablet

Added on 22/04/2026

Xandra Bingley’s first collection of short stories, Ways of Telling, is written in a distinctive style. It presents a series of memorable vignettes that feature workaday concerns, interior monologues and a jubilant disregard for the norms of standard punctuation.

Manchester Must Dance reviewed in the Mirror

Added on 18/04/2026

When Mike Pickering became resident DJ at the Hacienda in Manchester it was an arts venue where people often sat around listening to poetry. But he helped turn it into a cathedral of the acid house movement, packed to its black and yellow pillars with people raving, covered in sweat, with eyes like saucers.

Revolutions reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/04/2026

Of the many books published about revolutions, some begin in ancient times and move forward, while others are the work of multiple contributors who explore a common theme. The majority, though, are individual works that do not look back further than the seventeenth century.

The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living extract in Church Times

Added on 17/04/2026

Although it is often claimed that religion was the main force preventing the advancement of medical knowledge and the practice of proper medicine in the Middle Ages, the Church actually played an important part in educating the laity — and perhaps especially the illiterate — about their bodies.

Repetition reviewed in the TLS

Added on 17/04/2026

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud observed: The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it … He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of remembering it as something in the past.

Amedeo Modigliani feature and author interview in Art Newspaper

Added on 14/04/2026

After almost 30 years, several legal battles and a few death threats, Marc Restellini’s catalogue raisonné of Amedeo Modigliani’s oil paintings is finally published today (14 April) by the art historian and curator’s Institut Restellini, distributed by Yale University Press.