Reviews Archive

Zadie Smith at a literature festival at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

Review

Zadie Smith’s weighty Mantel piece

Slightly academic, deeply researched, and typically self-referential, Zadie Smith’s first attempt at a historical novel is, despite its debts, novel.

Lucy Thynne August 23, 2023

A board promoting the exhibition Naples in Paris is pictured at the Louvre museum in Paris.

Review

Ransacking Naples

The Museo e Bosco Reale di Capodimonte – Naples’ foremost museum of art – has decided to lend an unprecedented number of its artworks to the Louvre. But this glittering display of ..

Alexander Lee August 21, 2023

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Credit: GL Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Review

Hegel’s philosophy of history

Richard Bourke's latest study offers a powerful sense of why Hegel’s audiences were left spellbound by his analysis of ‘the successive missteps in the progress of moral life’.

Jeremy Jennings August 16, 2023

Map of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century. Credit: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo

Review

The limits of the Roman Empire

With the release of 'Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age', Tom Holland completes his three-volume study of Imperial Rome, and reveals that its emperors, good and bad, were larg..

Andrew Sillett August 10, 2023

General Edwin Walker (left) with Col. William Kuhn outside Central High School, Little Rock. Sept. 25, 1957.

Review

Edwin Walker: deep-state conspirator

General Edwin Walker, a war hero who became America’s ‘leading fascist’, was the target of an assassination attempt by Lee Harvey Oswald five months before JFK’s murder in November..

Phil Tinline August 9, 2023

The fresco of St. Augustine and his mother St. Monica in Basilica di Sant Agostino (Augustine) in Rome. Credit: jozef sedmak / Alamy Stock Photo

Review

The women who made Augustine

It is Augustine’s mother who is the first subject of his Confessions. A new study reveals the centrality of women to a work that is often considered to be the first autobiography.

David Lloyd Dusenbury August 8, 2023

Review

Europe’s forgotten people

Few people have been subject to so much mythologising as the Roma, though 600 years since their arrival in Europe, they remain little understood.

Mathew Lyons August 2, 2023

An orrery designed by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, c1630.

Review

The invention of the average

Economics, medicine, social and natural sciences would all be impossible without the concept of the ‘average’. Why then did it take historians so long to trace its origin to the se..

David Wootton July 27, 2023

The Bloomsbury group's least well-known member, Stephen Tomlin (1901-1937), with his glossy mop of hair, disarming charisma and undeniable talent, deserves to be just as renowned as his contemporaries Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf. The first major exhibition of his work at Philip Mould & Co - The Bloomsbury Stud: The Art of Stephen Tomlin (5 June - 11 August ) is aiming to return Tomlin to the artistic spotlight where he belongs and explore an alternative view of the Bloomsbury group, through the eyes of Tomlin.

Review

How it all went wrong for Stephen Tomlin

Talented and doomed, the artist Stephen Tomlin glittered briefly in the Bloomsbury Set but is now largely forgotten. A new exhibition puts his work in the spotlight.

Lucy Thynne July 20, 2023