Reviews

Review

How Germany misread Russia for three decades

Berlin's 30-year rapprochement with Russia is a cautionary tale of a country that became blind to the possibility of war – and is now paying the price.

Friedrich Asschenfeldt February 9, 2026

Review

The transformation of Ernst Kantorowicz

The mutable German-Jewish historian was many things, but never dull.

Samuel Rubinstein February 6, 2026

Review

How not to save opera

Treating culture as a battlefield is not the way to revitalise the world of opera.

Alexandra Wilson February 2, 2026

Review

The allure of Catholic conversion

From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, many British writers, artists and thinkers were drawn to the Catholic Church in the 20th century.

Guy Stagg January 29, 2026

Review

The power of night-thinking

Night-thinking reveals what our age of reason and certainty often overlooks: the power of the holistic, the intuitive, and the fragmentary.

Mateusz Strozynski January 26, 2026

Review

Britain’s ruthless rise

Early-modern Britain’s capitalists, industrialists, and entrepreneurs combined ambition, ingenuity, and moral compromise to transform the economic world.

Samuel Rubinstein January 19, 2026

Review

The woman who made the Tudors

Margaret Beaufort, grandmother of Henry VIII, used her iron resolve to lay the foundations of Tudor England.

Katherine Harvey January 15, 2026

Review

Thomas Mann’s art of contradiction

Morten Høi Jensen’s 'The Master of Contradictions' explores the tensions at the heart of Thomas Mann’s world and shows how, in 'The Magic Mountain', he heroically struggles to reso..

Charlotte Stroud January 14, 2026

Review

Seeing angels with William Blake

It is tempting to write Blake’s visions off as mere flights of fancy, the vivid but insubstantial by-products of a peculiarly mystical imagination. But for Blake, they were the key..

Alexander Lee January 6, 2026