News and reviews

Jonathan Goodman writes in the Guardian

Added on 18/05/2025

A recent piece of research commissioned by Channel 4 suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

Homeland reviewed in the TLS

Added on 16/05/2025

During protests in the US in the middle of 2020, a Predator drone circled in the sky above Minneapolis. Some 20,000ft below, the cops got to play with their toys: Humvees, armoured carriers with turrets, stuff built for the military, used extensively in the Middle East and sold at knockdown prices to local sheriffs.

Psyche Running reviewed in the TLS

Added on 16/05/2025

A poem in Durs Grünbein’s collection Equidistance, published in 2022, the year of his sixtieth birthday, evokes equidistance as a line passing through Berlin: “East-West-Axis”. So far, perhaps, so Grünbein. The axis configuring Berlin has configured the work of Germany’s most significant living poet in multifarious ways since he first emerged – pre-reunification – with Mornings in the Grey Zone(1988).

Mrs Dalloway reviewed in the TLS

Added on 16/05/2025

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, was published on May 14, 1925. Released to coincide with the centenary of one of Woolf’s most popular novels, Mark Hussey’s analysis concerns a productive and prolific period in the author’s life.

Horace featured in the Daily Mail

Added on 16/05/2025

In the autumn of 44 BC, after Julius Caesar’s brutal assassination, the ringleader, Brutus, was in Athens raising support for a full-scale conquest of Italy that would restore the values of the old Roman Republic.

The Manifesto House reviewed in the Spectator

Added on 15/05/2025

Only when history is decarbonised and decolonised will we understand how architecture should advance. For the time being, the art and science of building design are additionally hobbled by ‘systemic’ gender bias and ‘western-centric’ chauvinism.

Winifred Nicholson: Cumbrian Rag Rugs reviewed in World of Interiors

Added on 14/05/2025

Rag rugs are friendly things. Made throughout history, some say as far back as the Vikings, they came to prominence in the 1840s with the arrival of jute sacks, and remained popular right up until the 1950s and the era of fitted carpets.

Jamie Taylor interview in the NME

Added on 14/05/2025

A new book has been published telling the story of the bizarre “Wallace & Gromit-style” DIY music studio that was a breeding ground for some of Sheffield’s most experimental future-stars of the ’70s and ’80s.

The Catastrophe Hour featured in the Observer

Added on 11/05/2025

On 8 January of this year, the house I was renting in Altadena, California, burned down in one of the seven wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area that week. In the bigger picture, the loss of my house seems almost incidental.

Medium Hot reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 09/05/2025

Is AI fuelling cultural stagnation, and how quickly are we sacrificing the planet in the process? These are the kind of questions that surface while reading Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, the latest collection of essays by artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.

In Defence of Barbarism reviewed in the Morning Star

Added on 09/05/2025

Recently, Verso Books published a translation of Louisa Yousfi’s Rester barbare (Fabrique, 2022), giving it the English title In Defence of Barbarism: Non-whites Against the Empire. Some would call this text a brutal, crude, even savage book. My response to that charge is simple. That is part of its intention.

Babylon, Albion reviewed in Dazed

Added on 08/05/2025

Over the last few years, there have been intense, often bone-chilling debates across mainstream and social media about immigration. With the unprecedented popularity of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK, Donald Trump’s executive orders in January clamping down on immigration, and the rise of the far-right in many European countries, there is no denying that migration and movement between countries are being treated as increasingly urgent national issues.