Reviews

Review

Canada’s Pacific railway: an iron spine for a paper nation

Built to protect British North America from an economically ravenous United States, the Canadian Pacific Railway proved to be a quixotic project.

Michael Ledger-Lomas November 2, 2023

Review

Auden’s Austrian summer

A frustrating study suggests that the relationship between a British-born Viennese Aristocrat and W.H. Auden was crucial to the poet’s late-flowering.

Oliver Soden November 1, 2023

Review

A Chinese history to start a fire

Underground historians have provided a beacon of hope for resistance in Communist China. Ian Johnson's new book chronicles their struggles to produce and disseminate their scholars..

Michael Sheridan October 26, 2023

Review

After the Flood: Boulanger’s creation myth restored

An Enlightenment work of extraordinary intellectual ambition receives, at last, a ‘serviceable’ edition.

David Wootton October 23, 2023

Review

Celebrating Ligeti’s soundspace odyssey

The music of György Ligeti, the great Hungarian composer, still sounds like that of the future.

Benjamin Poore October 23, 2023

Review

Rethinking the medieval Mediterranean

In his new book, Chris Wickham studies the short and long-distance commerce that made Medieval Mediterranean society in a work that is ambitious, punchy and even occasionally amusi..

Nicholas Morton October 12, 2023

Review

Leviathan 2.0

Can Thomas Hobbes save the modern world?

Bryan Appleyard October 11, 2023

Review

The sound of salvation: music against the Nazis

A fascinating and essential book explores the lost legacies of the composers forced to flee the Nazis.

Jessica Duchen October 2, 2023

Review

How to make a nation

In 'Making a Modern Political Order', James J. Sheehan attempts to offer a history of the nation state as we know it, from its origins in other, now mostly unfamiliar, forms of pol..

Brian Smith September 27, 2023