Review
The grandeur of Verona’s open-air opera
Opera in Verona's ancient amphitheatre, open to the night sky, is a spectacle to be savoured.
Katherine Pangonis
September 18, 2026
Reviews
Significant works reviewed by Engelsberg Ideas writers.
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Review
The wisdom of not knowing
The physicist Carlo Rovelli has written one book to make you feel better, and another to make you feel much worse.
Bryan Appleyard
September 17, 2026
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Review
The Cold War blind spots behind Iran’s rift with the West
The story of a KGB officer who fled revolutionary Tehran for Britain shows how misjudgements in Moscow, London and Washington deepened the Islamic Republic's suspicion of foreign p..
Gill Bennett
September 16, 2026
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Review
Aristotle: a biography without a life
Philip Freeman's brisk life of Aristotle confirms how little the surviving record can tell us about the workings of the philosopher's mind.
Armand D'Angour
September 15, 2026
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Review
What did reading ever do for us?
James Marriott's polemic 'The New Dark Ages' mourns the passing of the print age. But it oversells the triumphs of mass literacy, and says too little about the costs.
Alastair Benn
September 10, 2026
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Review
The long history of hunting
Archaeologist Brian Fagan's investigation into the battles between hunters and conservationists, and the common ground they share, is enlightening.
Caroline Eden
September 9, 2026
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Review
Is conservative modernism the way forward for the right?
Anglo-American politics cries out for something better than the demagoguery and AI slop that dominate right-wing discourse. Conservative modernism offers a serious, literate altern..
Michael Lucchese
September 8, 2026
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Review
Judging leadership is not a science
Jared Diamond's survey of leaders through history underrates the degree to which evaluating leadership is a subjective art.
Marc Levinson
September 8, 2026
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Review
The end of Romanitas and the coming of the English
In the centuries after the retreat of the Roman Empire in the West, the Britons who had thought themselves the inheritors of Rome were overcome by Germanic incomers, a story of mig..
Mathew Lyons
September 7, 2026