News and reviews
French Fashion, Women, and the First World War reviewed in the TLS
Added on 29/02/2020
This collection of essays claims to be the first look at the Venn diagram of its subject matter. As Maude Bass-Krueger states in her introduction, “society held women to double standards when it came to getting dressed during the war”.
READ MOREThe Ruins featured in GQ’s 10 coolest things of the week
Added on 25/02/2020
The debut from Suede founding member and bassist Mat Osman is an altered state of a novel, mixing the crime of LA noir, the ambient cityscapes of JG Ballard and dark language games of Thomas Pynchon.
READ MOREMigrant City reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 24/02/2020
Every history of London — and there have been very many — has looked at the importance for the city of migration. Not to mention it would be as inconceivable as ignoring the River Thames. Both, after all, flow directly through the city’s heart.
READ MOREMigrant City reviewed in the Sunday Times
Added on 23/02/2020
Anyone curious about the impact of migration on the history and culture of London could do worse than read the chapter on food in this exhaustive history. The capital’s first coffee house was opened in the 1650s by an Armenian…
READ MOREMigrant City Book of the Week in the Evening Standard
Added on 21/02/2020
Fifteen minutes by train from Paddington, Southall is a “Little India” in the borough of Ealing. Set back amid the traffic in King Street is an ornate Hindu temple, and from the Punjabi stalls in Orchard Avenue you can buy jalebi.
READ MOREThe Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward reviewed in the LRB
Added on 19/02/2020
By the time Samuel Steward began to write his autobiography in 1978, at the age of 69, he’d had sex more than four thousand times with more than eight hundred men. Each encounter was carefully recorded in his ‘Stud File’.
READ MORELove is the Drug featured in Newsweek
Added on 14/02/2020
Think of who takes drugs like MDMA and images of waved, 20-somethings partying is more likely to come to mind than a middle-aged couple sat in front of a marriage counselor, thrashing out their deepest regrets and long-held resentments.
READ MOREThe Order of Forms reviewed in Times Higher Education
Added on 13/02/2020
Alice sits at a table in Wonderland with three strange characters: the Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse. Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of pique won’t move the clocks past six.
READ MOREMusic in the Present Tense reviewed in Times Higher Education
Added on 13/02/2020
“Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already revealed himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, his name is on every tongue. The fame of this hero knows no bounds save that of civilisation itself.”
READ MOREShamima Begum should be tried in Britain, argues Dr Philip Cunliffe
Added on 13/02/2020
Last week tribunal judges rejected Shamima Begum’s appeal against the decision to strip her of British citizenship. Begum, who is in a refugee camp in northern Syria, lost her citizenship after she left Britain to join Islamic State in 2015.
READ MORECosmopolitan Dystopia featured in the Daily Mail
Added on 12/02/2020
In his new book Cosmopolitan Dystopia, Dr Philip Cunliffe argues that Slave markets, perpetual war and ethnic cleansing are happening in the Greater Middle East due to an obsession with human rights rather than traditional foreign policy
READ MOREDrugs may be able to fix our romantic lives when things go wrong
Added on 12/02/2020
If a pill could make you fall in love and transform your romantic relationships, would you take it? Or if a doctor was able to prescribe an anti-love drug to help a break-up go smoothly, would you urge your partner to make an appointment?
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