News and reviews

Mistress reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 31/07/2025

Once the province of the art historian, the country house has become the focus of all manner of scholarly investigations over the past forty or fifty years. Everything from the economics of estate management and the lives of domestic servants to the Jewish country house, the queer country house and the country house’s links to colonialism has come under scrutiny.

The Death of Consensus mention in the New Statesman

Added on 31/07/2025

Britain isn’t working – for different reasons, voters across the political spectrum affirm this view. You don’t need to subscribe to the more dystopian accounts of the country’s state to recognise its validity.

Libya Since Qaddafi reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 31/07/2025

As the title suggests, Williams focuses on the period after the Western-inspired regime change which led to the assassination of Muammar Gadaffi and threw Libya into years of turmoil and destruction.

Glorious Failure reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 31/07/2025

‘The English cannot assimilate any nation,’ declared the narrator of a French travelogue set in India and published in the aftermath of the uprising of 1857. ‘They can only dominate with brutality, squeezing every last drop of blood from the veins of the oppressed.’

Death to Order reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 30/07/2025

In Geoffrey Household’s superlative thriller Rogue Male, from 1939, an English assassin-adventurer takes a potshot at Adolf Hitler and then flees for his life. An assassin’s intended victim is usually a “Hitler” of some sort. In July 2024, in Pennsylvania, an American youth aimed a rifle at Donald Trump from a rooftop and pulled the trigger.

Light on Darkness reviewed in the Tablet

Added on 25/07/2025

Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy is an illuminating journey through the affective resonances of Christianity’s rites and rituals. Cosima Clara Gillhammer argues that liturgy is not the relic of a bygone age but a living tradition which has shaped the grammar of western culture, from Michelangelo’s Pietà to the Marvel Universe. It is a small treasure of a text.

Awake! reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 21/07/2025

It’s striking how, in describing a William Blake image entitled Infant Sorrow, a writer would note how its figures inhabit an indoor setting and state how this choice “must be Blake’s way of indicating that weeping and yelling confine and darken the mind.”

Kenneth Rogoff writes in the Observer

Added on 19/07/2025

Understanding what motivates normal politicians to follow bad economic advice is difficult enough. Are they paying off some special interest, or do they really believe that two plus two equals three? With Donald Trump, the difficulty of interpreting the motivation for his policies sometimes goes to a whole different level.

Small Earthquakes reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 18/07/2025

Most people are aware, even if not knowledgeable, about the history of British imperialism in Africa and the Far East but few will have even heard about British exploits in Latin America.

Boccaccio reviewed in the Literary Review

Added on 18/07/2025

In early June 1363, Giovanni Boccaccio received a letter that stung him deeply. Just a few days shy of his fiftieth birthday, he was then at the height of his creative powers. He had already penned at least a dozen major works, including the Decameron, any one of which would have assured him a place alongside Dante and Petrarch in the firmament of Italian literature.

The Opening Ritual reviewed in the TLS

Added on 18/07/2025

G. C. Waldrep’s poetry has always invited readers to “feast” on its byzantine density. That image, the “feast”, appears frequently in his collections (such as the fittingly titled feast gently, 2018); his latest book, The Opening Ritual, also offers an abundance of his characteristically detailed, conceptually vast stanzas.

Oak Origins reviewed in the TLS

Added on 18/07/2025

“I have now found the law of the oak leaves” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal, after pages of worry about the tree’s “difficult” organisation. That difficulty is the result of a fascinating evolutionary inception, which Andrew L. Hipp, herbarium director at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, untangles brilliantly in his new book, Oak Origins: From acorns to species and the tree of life.