News and reviews
Author interview in Aspects of History
Added on 14/08/2026
That word, mission, might make you think of Robert De Niro or Jeremy Irons, perhaps a young Liam Neeson, in Jesuit robes clambering up the Iguazu Falls in deepest South America, but, forgotten and less-documented as their efforts may be, there was a Protestant expansion too, a clear, not-so-Papist will to propagate the Gospel to the world, that challenges those preconceptions.
READ MOREAccidental Tyrant reviewed in the LRB
Added on 13/08/2026
North Korea is an anomaly. Its GDP per capita is at least thirty times smaller than South Korea’s, but it is also an industrialised, predominantly urban society with near total literacy and many more doctors and teachers than the other states below 150th place in global wealth rankings.
READ MOREThe Kiss featured in the Guardian
Added on 13/08/2026
Call it a crisis, call it a decline, call it a recession: the long, lusty snog is in trouble, harder to experience in real life or even watch on screen. But why? And what’s it like to think you may never lock lips with another?
READ MORELove is Strong as Death reviewed in the TLS
Added on 07/08/2026
Despite its subtitle, this biography of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) is not quite a biography. And it does not really provide an account of what was innovative about his philosophy. What it does provide, supremely well, is an introduction to the dilemmas that German Jews faced before and after the First World War, and to the general tenor of their world.
READ MORETojo reviewed in the TLS
Added on 07/08/2026
Are humans becoming obsolescent in warfare? One of the hottest topics in military thought is the role of artificial intelligence in the battlespace. AI enables the processing of huge amounts of data at rates far greater than humans could manage, which, in theory at least, greatly enhances the efficiency of armed forces in battle.
READ MOREGiovanni Battista Maini (1690-1752) and Roman Sculpture of His Time reviewed in the TLS
Added on 07/08/2026
The title of Jennifer Montagu’s latest book encapsulates the challenge of writing about a sculptor who was famous in his own time, but left behind a small oeuvre and no school of followers. Giovanni Battista Maini was one of a host of sculptors and architects who came to Rome from Lombardy from the sixteenth century onwards, a group that included Francesco Borromini and Maini’s teacher, Camillo Rusconi.
READ MOREAncient Wisdom for Polarized Times reviewed in the TLS
Added on 07/08/2026
Two new books contribute to the growing trend of bringing ancient wisdom to bear on contemporary problems. In Consolations, Irene Vallejo, a journalist with a doctorate in classics, collects almost 200 of her essays originally published in the Spanish newspaper El País and beautifully translated into English by Charlotte Whittle
READ MOREUS Grand Strategy and the Madman Theory reviewed in the
Added on 07/08/2026
The problem with writing about Donald Trump is that one can expend an enormous amount of energy trying to explain moves he doesn’t understand himself. He has a set of underlying, and mostly wrong, beliefs about the world – mainly consisting of the idea that the US is being taken advantage of by everyone else.
READ MOREFirst Among Equals reviewed in the TLS
Added on 07/08/2026
The problem with writing about Donald Trump is that one can expend an enormous amount of energy trying to explain moves he doesn’t understand himself. He has a set of underlying, and mostly wrong, beliefs about the world – mainly consisting of the idea that the US is being taken advantage of by everyone else.
READ MOREHow England Began reviewed in the TLS
Added on 07/08/2026
The Adventus Saxonum, the Coming of the English, is perhaps the biggest enigma in the historiography of the British Isles. How, between the fifth century and the seventh, did the eastern and southeastern lowlands of the late Roman province of Britannia, with their Latin and British dialects, become the many little kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, chiefly speaking dialects of Old English?
READ MOREEmpress Matilda reviewed in the Daily Mail
Added on 02/08/2026
If the average person knows anything about Empress Matilda it is likely to be the romantic story of her escape from Oxford in the winter of 1142. She had been besieged for weeks at Oxford Castle by Stephen of Blois, her cousin and rival for the throne of England. Castle supplies were running low and the situation was desperate.
READ MOREPericles reviewed in Literary Review
Added on 01/08/2026
Even Xi Jinping is thinking about Pericles these days. He is worried about the so-called ‘Thucydides trap’, named for the ancient Greek historian who first described what was then Pericles’s problem. In the mid-fifth century BC, Pericles was leader of Athens, the fast-rising second power in Greece.
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