Reviews

Significant works reviewed by Engelsberg Ideas writers.

A drawing made by an inmate of Auschwitz in 1945 featuring an orchestra.
Review

Music in Auschwitz

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

Benjamin Poore January 31, 2025
US flag on an industrial site outside Seattle.
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
A 19th Century German woodcut of the death of Socrates.
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
Still from A Complete Unknown featuring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan.
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
Kaiser Wilhelm II and his six sons parading in Berlin for the New Year's Address of 1914.
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
Beneath the Croatian flag members of the guard are lined up during a ceremony in front of the Croatian parliament building in Zagreb, 1991.
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
Still from Maria, starring Angelina Jolie.
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
A detail from the frieze, the Siege of Malta.
Review

The Great Siege of Malta through Ottoman eyes

A new study makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of the events of 1565 by emphasising Ottoman testimonies and deploying a global perspective.

Roger Crowley January 13, 2025
The London Sinfonietta's performance of Samuel Beckett's Quad.
Review

Music at the end of time

The austere beauty of Morton Feldman's settings of Samuel Beckett shows how art can escape and reshape time itself.

Benjamin Poore January 8, 2025

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