Reviews Archive

Salvador Dali's The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.

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

In January 1979, huge crowds on the streets of Tehran, Iran, celebrate Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's decision to leave the country and go into exile.

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

A 19th-century engraving depicts Aristotle teaching Alexander the Great.

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

A detail from an illustration by Edward Penfield for the cover of Harper’s Magazine.

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

The Hunt in the Forest (1470) by Paolo Uccello at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Credit: Brian Harris

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

Jacob Epstein's statue of St Michael subduing the Devil at Coventry Cathedral.

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

Portrait of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy by Aaron Shikler.

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

'The Destruction of Roman Britain', 1926.

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

Map showing the evolution of the Ottoman Empire between 1792 and 1878. By Paul Vidal de Lablache, Atlas Classique, Librerie Colin, Paris, 1894.

Review

An Ottoman age of experiments

Far from being the 'Sick Man of Europe', the late Ottoman Empire witnessed a period of extraordinary political adaptation.

Daniel Neep September 4, 2026