Reviews

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

Review

Bob Dylan, the last of the best

No other living artist has so successfully and for so long lit up the vastness of the American experiment as Bob Dylan, as an ambitious, knowing biopic reveals.

Alastair Benn January 22, 2025

Review

The Kaiser and the Nazis

A landmark study, recently translated into English, exposes the House of Hohenzollern's complicity in the rise of Hitler's Germany, and reveals how the family helped to make nation..

Samuel Rubinstein January 21, 2025

Review

The quest for Croatia

A comprehensive history tells the story of Croat national aspirations, and provides a detailed account of Croatia’s long road to independence.

Jack Dickens January 15, 2025

Review

Maria Callas made her own myths

Pablo Larraín’s biopic of the great diva Maria Callas asks whether the famous and the great get to write their own scripts.

Alexandra Wilson January 15, 2025