News and reviews

Between the Salt and the Ash reviewed in Church Times

Added on 19/09/2025

The poet and writer Jake Morris-Campbell was born in South Shields in 1988. My family came from a couple of miles to the north of there, on the other side of the River Tyne.

Ann Pettifor writes in the Guardian

Added on 18/09/2025

Over a year into power, Starmer’s government is floundering – but it still has time on its side. In the first of a two-part series, our panelists recommend ways it can save itself

Family Romance reviewed in the LRB

Added on 17/09/2025

There are few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses.

Dr Bot reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 10/09/2025

One evening during my anaesthesiology career, I walked towards the hospital parking lot, where I saw a surgeon kissing a nurse in a dark corner. I was surprised, as I thought the surgeon had been dating a different nurse.

Alchemy reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 05/09/2025

Alchemy, astrology and medicine (before the triumph of germ theory): three worthless intellectual systems which provided a good living for many into the 18th century and even beyond.

Dr Bot featured in the Daily Mail

Added on 05/09/2025

What is the future of health care? Will it have a human face? Or will we all be making appointments to see what Blease calls Dr. Bot, an AI-powered physician.

Storyteller reviewed in the New Statesman

Added on 03/09/2025

In terms of literary reputation, Robert Louis Stevenson had a distinctly mixed 20th century, but is doing better in the 21st. Following his death in 1894, he was internationally acclaimed as a writer of at least three imperishable novels (Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped), a handful of great short stories (“Thrawn Janet” chief among them), and another handful of important essays, including “A Humble Remonstrance”, his response to Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction”.

The Uglow Papers reviewed in the Art Newspaper

Added on 02/09/2025

Andrew Lambirth’s approach in The Uglow Papers is a curious one. The art critic and writer eschews a conventional monograph on the British painter Euan Uglow (1932-2000) by bringing together a selection of contributors and, through a series of memoirs or papers, allowing them to speak for themselves.

Francesca Galligan writes in the Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

Richard de Bury, as chancellor and treasurer to Edward III, was lucky enough to see all manner of books. He shared his love of them in Philobiblon, a guide for fellow bibliophiles. But this is how he described what he found in the cabinets and caskets of England’s monasteries in the 14th century:

The French Revolution reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

Is it possible to say anything new about the French Revolution? Perhaps not, unless fresh sources come to light. Whether it might be possible to say something that has been so long forgotten that it appears to be new is a different question, one that John Hardman seeks to answer in this rigorously old-fashioned, explicitly political account of the events that lie ‘at the strategic centre of modern history’.

Unfrozen reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

In the abrasive new world of strongman leaders, international institutions have lost leverage and NGOs have struggled to get a hearing (many illiberal regimes have banned them as alien influences). As the authors of this fascinating book on the Arctic argue, collaborative governance of the global commons has also atrophied.

The Maginot Line reviewed in Literary Review

Added on 01/09/2025

In 1968, the French politician Pierre Mendès France was interviewed for the film The Sorrow and the Pity. Mendès France – who had escaped from a Vichy prison to join the Free French air force – described what he took to be the absurdity of the spirit in which the last governments of the Third Republic approached military matters before the defeat of 1940, which ended that republic.