News and reviews

Love is Resistance featured in Dazed

Added on 10/10/2025

Published by Saqi Books and currently available for pre-order, Love is Resistance features 77 commissioned tear-out posters by artists, writers, students, and activists from around the world. In a conversation with the book’s author and founding editor, Aya Mousawi, alongside contributor Shumon Basar, we learn about the powerful role poster-making can wield.

Multicultural Britain featured in the Observer

Added on 10/10/2025

Thirty years ago, the Birmingham-born musician Steven Kapur – better known by his stage name, Apache Indian – released his second album, Make Way for the Indian. Like his first record, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Mercury prize, the album was a pioneering mix of Kapur’s key musical influences: Jamaican reggae, dancehall and traditional Indian bhangra.

America’s Middle East reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 07/10/2025

Marc Lynch is angry. The word ‘rage’ appears six times on the first page, and comes in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. This should be sufficient warning to anyone expecting a cool, calm, dispassionate analysis of the Middle East that they might have picked up the wrong book.

Enshittification excerpt in the Guardian

Added on 05/10/2025

It’s not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast. The services we rely on, that we once loved? They’re all turning into piles of shit, all at once. Ask any Facebook user who has to scroll past 10 screens of engagement-bait, AI slop and surveillance ads just to get to one post by the people they are on the service to communicate with.

British Blonde reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 01/10/2025

What do we think of when we think of blondes? Perhaps Scandinavia, where blonde hair is commonplace, or iconic blonde stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. Sexy Swedes, brash Americans or free-spirited Frenchwomen – not Britishness, that’s for sure.

Vanessa Bell reviewed in the Art Newspaper

Added on 01/10/2025

There is an inherent tension present from the opening pages of Wendy Hitchmough’s new biography, Vanessa Bell: The Life and Art of a Bloomsbury Radical.

Holly Smith writes in the Guardian

Added on 01/10/2025

There is nothing, it seems to me, more appalling, more deadening in the urban landscape than a uniform mass of low buildings covering acres and acres … High dwellings – I think, really very high dwellings – are an enormous enhancement of the scene.”

Mrs Dalloway mention in the Guardian

Added on 27/09/2025

A trio of early stories by Virginia Woolf which together form a spoof biography of a family friend have been rediscovered and are set to be published next month.

Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript reviewed in the LRB

Added on 25/09/2025

At two o’clock in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was on fire.

Orbán featured in the Economist

Added on 23/09/2025

The hard right is on the march in Europe. The Alternative for Germany, a party declared extremist by domestic spooks, scored a record result in a national election in February.

Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House reviewed in the Observer

Added on 21/09/2025

The Lovell Health House, completed in 1930, a composition of white planes miraculously poised over a steep slope near the Hollywood Hills, is the consummation of a love affair. On the one hand, there was the avant garde of central Europe, from where the house’s architect, Richard Neutra, came with an admiration for the industrial technology and can-do attitude of the United States.

Storyteller reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 19/09/2025

The discriminating Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges once revealed his fondness for ‘hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson’ – a list that was quirky and eclectic, adjectives that neatly encapsulate Robert Louis Stevenson himself.