Reviews

Review

Partygoing at the opera

The idea of the party has a long lineage in the history of opera. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Festen is the latest contribution.

Benjamin Poore February 19, 2025

Review

Goya in conversation with Cézanne

The Courtauld's exhibition, Goya to Impressionism, embodies the importance of art that speaks in multiple individual voices, and creates a world in which the painter's provocations..

Mathew Lyons February 18, 2025

Review

The wages of a nuclear war

We are now entering a third nuclear age shaped by fractured geopolitics and rapidly-changing technologies.

Christopher Harding February 13, 2025

Review

Mining for meaning

In Philip Marsden’s expansive new book, the wonder of the world resides in rocks.

Caroline Eden February 11, 2025

Review

Mirandola’s marvels

In his willingness to break the limits of language and seek what lay beyond the thinkable, the Renaissance scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola explored facets of collective human..

Mathew Lyons February 10, 2025

Review

The making of Oscar Wilde

An exhibition at Magdalen College, Oxford explores Oscar Wilde’s time there as a student 150 years ago, and the success and disgrace which followed.

Malcolm Forbes February 3, 2025

Review

Music in Auschwitz

Concentration camp prisoners turned music into a powerful act of resistance against the Nazis.

Benjamin Poore January 31, 2025

Review

America’s retreat from free trade

An impressive insider account provides a fresh explanation of the causes, and consequences, of the United States' turn towards protectionist trade policies in Asia.

Samuel Gregg January 28, 2025

Review

How to think like Socrates

Agnes Callard's study of the life of Socrates is a compelling and elegant manifesto for a mode of philosophy that is less an academic pursuit of abstract concepts than a shared inq..

Guy Stagg January 27, 2025