Reviews

Review

Great Books: Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography

The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel is the subject of this unexpectedly profound and witty book.

Daisy Dunn February 10, 2023

Review

How Classics captured the Chinese imagination

This original and provocative book explores contemporary China’s love of Greek and Roman classics — and their unexpected use in supporting the regime’s political agenda.

Michael Sheridan February 10, 2023

Review

Capitalism’s Dutch dynamic

This economic history of the Low Countries handles an epoch-shaping phenomenon in deft and informative style.

Samuel Gregg February 3, 2023

Review

The infinite delight of Italo Calvino

Calvino’s restlessness filled him with an insatiable curiosity.

Alexander Lee January 27, 2023

Review

Great Books: Colette’s The Pure and the Impure

The free spirited feminist probed and questioned the social conventions of her day without passing moral judgements.

Agnès Poirier January 27, 2023

Review

Napoleon: the revolutionary who made himself an emperor

This concise and impressive work details the ruler’s ultimate triumph against, and betrayal of, the French Revolution.

Katherine Bayford January 20, 2023

Review

Great Books: William Golding’s The Spire

The social hierarchy of medieval cathedral building is the jumping-off point for Golding’s masterly exploration of faith, delusion and obsession.

Matthew Lloyd Roberts January 13, 2023

Review

Queenly forces to be reckoned with

The historian Alison Weir places the focus back on the lives of the women who sometimes challenged, but indisputably shaped and secured, England’s royal dynasty.

Estelle Paranque January 13, 2023

Review

Have Realists lost their way?

In An Unwritten Future, Jonathan Kirshner argues that realists have lost their way. If realism is a pessimistic intellectual tradition of thought about world politics, for Kirshner..

Patrick Porter January 6, 2023