Reviews

Review

The ins and outs of the European project

A fresh, exciting but flawed analysis of the EU’s civilisational mission.

Samuel Rubinstein September 4, 2023

Review

Mad dog Diogenes

Truth and fiction elide in the life of the colourful figurehead of cynicism, which presents a considerable challenge to the biographer.

Armand D'Angour August 31, 2023

Review

György Kurtág contemplates his endgame

The 97-year-old is one of the last living links to the defining postwar composers of the European avant-garde.

Benjamin Poore August 30, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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