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Reviews

Significant works reviewed by Engelsberg Ideas writers.

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
Roma in Britain.
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
Jacqueline du Pré
Review

A musical masterpiece

Jennifer Atkins' brilliant but neglected novel reminds us why classical music matters – and why it is under threat like never before

Daniel Johnson July 17, 2023
Seventeenth-century Dutch peasant with two daggers attacks another card player in a dark tavern wields a knife.
Review

The long tail of elite violence

An enthralling new study demolishes the old idea that the rise of the modern European state was a civilising process.

David Wootton July 13, 2023
Marshal Pétain at his trial in 1945.
Review

Banishing Pétain’s ghost

As de Gaulle’s star rose – as de Gaulle became the centrepiece of French national identity and pride – Pétain’s fell.

Samuel Rubinstein July 12, 2023
The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1622–1654).
Review

Carel Fabritius: a precarious life

The art critic Laura Cumming turns her eye to the elusive Dutch golden-age painter Carel Fabritius.

Francesca Peacock July 11, 2023

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