Reviews

Review

George Forster’s dazzlingly humane vision

The German naturalist rejected the racial classifications of his age, and his capacity for forgiveness was almost inhuman. Andrea Wulf lets the reader bask in his sensitive apprehe..

Mathew Lyons July 1, 2026

Review

The restless eye of James McNeill Whistler

A man in constant motion, Whistler was a painter, printmaker and provocateur who spent a lifetime reinventing both himself and his art.

Alexandra Wilson June 30, 2026

Review

Brexit and the roads not taken

On the 10th anniversary of the referendum, three recent histories explore Britain's fraught relationship with the EU.

Sean McGlynn June 23, 2026

Review

Russell Kirk’s poetics of power

Russell Kirk was an exceptional kind of conservative intellectual, talented and blessed with a practical bent, who revealed the poetic sensibility that inspired some of America's g..

Ferenc Hörcher June 19, 2026

Review

A history of Britain in by-elections

The fate of Britain's peculiar democracy has often turned on obscure by-elections, where a local grievance could herald an earthquake in the nation's affairs.

Christopher Silvester June 18, 2026

Review

Who really was Mackenzie King, the maker of modern Canada?

A new collection of essays revisits the life of a séance-holding Presbyterian bachelor whom historians routinely rank as Canada's greatest prime minister, yet one largely ignored b..

Yuan Yi Zhu June 15, 2026

Review

Slavery was the air the Romans breathed

With no first-person narratives surviving, Emma Southon draws skilfully on epigraphy to recover the lives of enslaved Romans. But her thin treatment of Roman comedy leaves a valuab..

Orlando Gibbs June 15, 2026

Review

Francis Spufford’s incorrigibly plural world

Spufford's new novel conjures a wartime London at once enchanting and terrifying, alive with metamorphic possibility.

Mathew Lyons June 12, 2026

Review

The forgotten Scots who gave Kafka his voice

For half a century, Edwin and Willa Muir's translations were how the Anglophone world read Kafka. A prize-winning study of his translators barely registers their contribution.

Boyd Tonkin June 10, 2026