Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i The Critic

“SINCE IT IS DIFFICULT FOR A UNIVERsity to agree by common consent and unanimous will, we enact that all regents or a majority of them shall appoint a Chancellor of their own choosing who has the knowledge, will and power to be, as it were, the superior of all.” So begin the first statutes of the University of Cambridge, written around 1250 when the institution was still just decades young. The confidence and clarity of the Latin, however, are undeniable: the university would appoint a pre-eminent and trusted figure from among its own body to navigate difficult and contentious decisions. Little could these scholars know how difficult and contentious a future Cambridge would be facing in 2025. And nothing could they know of how astoundingly weak the potential candidates for…

ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN BIRMINGHAM two unsettling rumours started to spread through the city. The first involved a loose bull said to have escaped either an abattoir or some obscure ritual sacrifice from one of the city’s rapidly changing inner suburbs. Now it was running amok in a state of confused rage near a roundabout. The second, perhaps not unrelated sighting, was of "a miserable-looking prick" wandering the streets who according to the suspicious patrons of the Jewellers’ Arms resembled the LBC firebrand James O’Brien. Such foreboding signs are a fixture in Birmingham these days. A city once a byword for second status provincialism is now a rite of passage for journalists and politicians in search of the new country we now find ourselves living in. The council is bankrupt, fittingly…

WHETHER OR NOT WHITE BRITONS cared how black immigrants from British colonies referred to them in 1956, Colin MacInnes was keen to tell them. Eight years after the Empire Windrush brought that first wave of Caribbean migrants to Tilbury Docks, his essay, “A Short Guide For Jumbles (to the Life of their Coloured Brethren in England)”, revealed that the Jumble of the title was a corruption of “John Bull”, used by West Africans to describe Englishmen “in a spirit of tolerant disdain”. In his eagerness to enlighten the Jumble, the author seemed to be inadvertently confirming certain fallacies, as well as stereotyping both blacks and whites to a risible degree. He wrote: “What most differentiates the African from the Englishman is that our chief ambition is to put our lives…

JUST THE OTHER AFTERNOON, HEADING INTO Norwich city centre on the bus, I looked out of the window and saw Paul Baker’s uncle striding towards me. This in itself isn’t unusual. I tend to come across Mr Baker, the relative of a man with whose child my youngest son long ago played football, two or three times a month: wheeling his bicycle, say, around the corner near the park where I walk the dog; hastening out of a Norwich City game a minute or two before the final whistle, or exiting a convenience store with a grocery bag on his arm. Mr Baker (Christian name unknown), grey-haired, red-faced and perpetually in motion somewhere, is a Norwich “character”. The Norwich of my childhood, back in the early 1970s, was full of…

FOR ANYONE WHO HAS EVER aspired to write a science-fantasy saga, the tale of Cedric Lampwick will be highly instructive. Mr Lampwick, a certified accountant living in Hove, devoted many a long evening in the 1970s to the composition of a 200,000-word novel entitled The Chronicles of Magnesia. The planet of the title lay in a remote galaxy. Magnesia was populated by bands of uncouth trolls, under the sway of the vengeful warrior queen Atalanta-Ra, who spoke a curious and not immediately intelligible language called xyrdrch, but Mr Lampwick helpfully supplied a glossary. After receiving rejection letters from no fewer than 27 of the publishers whose names he had run to earth in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, Mr Lampwick was about to find some other hobby, when, at the…

Edmund Stewart is Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek History at the University of Nottingham IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT THE HUMANITIES are in crisis. If so, this new book by distinguished Roman historian Walter Scheidel should be of interest to anyone who studies or teaches the Humanities, and especially Classics and Ancient History. Scheidel’s proposal, though, is very far from these disciplines’ usual apologetical literature. He advocates for “closing Classics”, that is the abolition of the very discipline that he and his colleagues are currently paid to teach, and its replacement with a “global” or “foundational” Ancient History. Scheidel’s critique of Classics is blunt, irreverent and consciously “disrespectful” (his term). This honesty is refreshing and gratifying. This review is a reply in the same spirit and it is hoped that it…

Brunelleschi and the Moment of the Renaissance Marvin Trachtenberg (Reaktion, £40) Alexander Lee is the author of Machiavelli: His Life and Times WHEN THE DOME OF FLORENCE Cathedral was completed in 1436, it was hailed as the dawning of a new age in architecture — a feat of engineering so incredible that not even the ancients could have matched it. According to Giorgio Vasari, however, it only existed because of an egg. Until about 20 years before, the dome had seemed almost impossible. Although there were plenty of architects vying to build it, the space it needed to span was so huge that no one could figure out how to make the scaffolding strong enough. No one, that is, until Filippo Brunelleschi came along. Bold as brass, he announced that he…

The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution Andrew Doyle (Constable, £25) Henry George is a freelance writer and researcher based in the UK IT HAS BECOME A COMMON TALKING POINT among certain sections of the commentariat that wokeness has peaked and is in fact on the decline and in retreat. The latest and most thorough exposition of this view is Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke, in which Doyle discusses what wokeness was, what it did, and why it failed. The author presents his case in clear, clean prose that is a pleasure to read. The problem comes from the arguments articulated by this prose. The author fails to make a convincing case, fatally hamstrung by his deepest philosophical priors.…

MOUNTAINS DO STRANGE THINGS to us. You see one, and a thought appears in your head. What would it feel like to stand at the top? Before you know it, you’re stirred into bracing action. But “bracing” means different things to different people. For most, a hike to the summit is enough. Others like to run or climb, or to add further peaks. And then there are the subjects of Peter McDonald’s new book. England’s Everest is a short, gripping history of a vanishingly narrow sporting niche: the quest to climb as many Cumbrian peaks as possible in the space of 24 hours. It’s not a complicated challenge. Each peak must be 2,000ft or higher; you must start and finish in the same place; you cannot use GPS navigation; and you…

Myra Hess: National Treasure Jessica Duchen (Kahn & Averill, £40) Alexandra Wilson is a musicologist, cultural historian and commentator on the arts AS THE CRITIC EDWIN EVANS OBSERved in The Sketch in January 1940, war forced many people to reflect on the importance of the arts. “The majority of Englishmen,” he wrote, “class music, and for that matter, the arts generally, with ‘luxury trades’. It took a month’s deprivation to make them realise what life might become if it had no music.” A key figure in keeping music alive was the pianist Myra Hess, who organised a series of concerts at the then empty National Gallery, its paintings dispatched to the countryside for safekeeping. Jessica Duchen’s chunky, sumptuously illustrated biography of Hess draws upon a vast number of primary sources…

THE NOUGHTIES ARE, REPORTEDLY, back in fashion. This seems like indecent haste to me — how can the noughties be revived when they only happened about five minutes ago? But it’s true. Social media trends show that the kids are watching Skins and Sex and the City. They’re wearing low-slung jeans and Kate Moss-style camisoles. And they’re listening to noughties music. I know this from personal experience, because when I ask one of my children (23 and 19) to choose some music for the car, there’s a decent chance they’ll end up playing something I bought on CD the first time around: LCD Soundsystem, Daft Punk, the Streets. It’s not just my family, either. Listen to the new PinkPantheress mixtape, Fancy That, and you’ll hear a set of musical references…

HISTORY IS FULL OF “WHAT-IFS?”, perhaps nowhere more than the Second World War. What if Britain, France and Czechoslovakia had gone to war when Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland in October 1938? What if the German resistance’s July 1944 bomb plot had succeeded and killed Hitler? And, most delicate of all, what if the Nazis had invaded and conquered Britain? Our national myth, rooted in the Battle of Britain, D-Day and Dunkirk is that we would have fought and never surrendered. But would we? The pro-Nazi sympathies of a good part of Britain’s ruling elite are well documented. They reached right to Buckingham Palace and elements of the Royal family. Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, openly admired the Third Reich. Len Deighton and C.J. Samson explored a Nazi-ruled…

TATE CALLS THE VIDEO MAKER ED Atkins, who became known for his uncanny computer-generated avatar films in the early 2010s, one of the most influential living British artists. That the British public would not recognise his work is a glib indictment of the institution’s view of itself. More importantly, however, it is a testament that the machine’s proximity to the human — the key concern of the artist’s work — is intrinsic today. Atkins’s aesthetics of emotive CGI figures has become one with the world we live in, and it is not obvious which has subsumed which. A major survey of his work at the museum, presented and narrated by the artist as if in the first person, now reveals that the transhumanist optimism of virtualisation that characterised recent decades…

“CAN I TALK TO YOU ABOUT breaded chicken for an article on traditional festive Spanish food?” The journalist’s question surprised me. I have never thought of the dish as either festive or traditional — or even particularly palatable since its corruption under the influence of the greasy, gargantuan slabs that issue in revolting “buckets” from uniformly Americanised outlets, like deadly monsters, spilling and crawling from alien spacecraft. The genuinely traditional fried chicken recipe in Spain is for pollo al ajillo — jointed and swirled in garlic-rich olive oil. Until factory-farming — another intrusion from the US — began to plump up chickens in the 1950s, the meat was usually too scrawny for quick cooking of any kind. Longstanding Spanish methods of treating it involved slow braising or stewing, typically with…

“JAMAIS UN BOUTON SANS BOUTONNIÈRE” adjured Coco Chanel, all-time couturière legend, part-time cabaret chanteuse and one-time lover (she had many) of Captain “Boy” Capel. Of course, Chanel was not right about everything. After all, she was also a sometime collaboratrice of Vichy France and SS spymaster Walter Schellenberg, but like many amongst the French elite, from Maurice Chevalier to François Mitterrand, de Gaulle’s dégradation nationale did not do her too much harm. However, on the matter of lapel decoration, Coco Chanel was bang on the button. At one time in the last century, anyone who considered themselves a gentleman would consider themselves undressed without a buttonhole. Like most things belonging to a better time, there are rules of attachment. First and foremost, the bud’s stem must be pushed through the…

LIKE ALL RIGHT-MINDED TROTS, I’d always assumed that the department store, Liberty, was named according to some freedom through capitalism-type ethos, which — unlike most Trots — I am obviously totally down with. Not so! Turns out, there was an enterprising draper’s son called Arthur Lasenby Liberty with a penchant for Eastern clobber knocking about Regent Street in the second half of the nineteenth century. Liberty had forged his taste at Farmer & Rogers’s Shawl and Cloak Emporium (o dream concept!), managing its Oriental Warehouse, which bought up much of the exotic debris from the London International Exhibition of 1862. Here he brushed shoulders with tastemakers such as William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. In 1875, after ten years at the helm, Arthur L.L. asked to be made…

SAVE 38% Subscribe for just £25 today and get The Critic for 6 months in print and online. VISIT: thecritic.imbmsubscriptions.com/JULY25 OR CALL 01293 312250 quoting July25 5 issues of The Critic magazine Free delivery each month of the print edition Full access to digital editions 38% saving on the shop price T&CS: CLOSING DATE FOR ORDERS IS 1ST SEPTEMBER 2025. THE PRICE SHOWN IS A UK DIRECT DEBIT OFFER. YOUR SUBSCRIPTION WILL BEGIN WITH THE NEXT AVAILABLE ISSUE. IF YOU DO NOT CANCEL AT THE END OF THE PAYMENT TERM, THE SUBSCRIPTION WILL AUTO-RENEW BY DIRECT DEBIT FOR 5 ISSUES AT £25. ALL SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE NON-REFUNDABLE. THIS IS A LIMITED OFFER AND MAY BE WITHDRAWN AT ANY TIME. PLEASE NOTE: BY SUBSCRIBING WE WILL CONTACT YOU ABOUT YOUR SUBSCRIPTION FROM…

Until 1920, king’s counsels needed to obtain a special licence if they wished to appear against the Crown. Silks were, after all, His Majesty’s counsels learned in the law, and upon their appointment had to promise to “take no wages or fee of any man” against the sovereign, an undertaking that law officers make to this day. Nothing could be further from the thoughts of Philippe Sands KC, who last year gleefully told a Cambridge audience, “It’s a really fantastic thing about Britain that I think it’s probably the only country in the world where when you’ve been to an international court against your own country, won, and humiliated them completely, they still celebrate you and that is special.” Mr Sands, as some readers will recall, was until last December…

“I’m Marcus and I’m a phoneaholic.” THERE. I’VE SAID IT. EVER since buying an iPhone immediately after starting my curacy I have been hooked. It’s the best toy I’ve ever bought and has become my closest companion. It satisfies my thirst for knowledge, helps me win debates, stops me getting bored on trains, enables me to stay in touch with friends and family across the world in a way impossible beforehand. And yet there I was in a major London religious establishment (I shall not name and shame) glowering because I had been forced to use my phone in order to access their order of service that day. It was a Sunday during last year’s summer holiday and I was attending the Eucharist with my mother. Things got off to…

CAMBRIDGE! MORE NOBEL PRIZES THAN WELL-KNOWN country France! Being its Chancellor must be a vastly august role attracting candidates of global stature! To celebrate this FACT, The Critic gives you this free cut-out-and-keep game to play at home, in your bachelor fellow’s set. Enjoy all the thrills of choosing between the candidates the University’s faceless administrators have allowed you to have! What principles did they follow before they helped you with their careful sifting? Who cares? Experience for yourself the frisson of choosing a successor to Thomas Cromwell, the Duke of Monmouth, Prince Albert, Arthur Balfour and whoever was Chancellor of Cambridge until now! But play those cards carefully, as you wouldn’t want to lumber one of Western civilisation’s chief bulwarks with a total dud for a decade, would you? Dr…

Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination Mark Vernon (Hurst, £27.50) TWO WILLIAM BLAKES VIE FOR dominance. One the one hand, there’s the gently mystical Blake of England’s “green and pleasant land” — the Blake of the Women’s Institute, Tate Britain, illustrated tea towels, and a London no higher than St Paul’s; a Blake concerned with “dark Satanic mills”, the abolition of slavery and the magic of exotic animals. On the other, there’s a wild, hedonic, revolution-loving proto-hippie Blake, naked in his garden, touched by vital and romantic madness who exhorts his readers to tear down institutions, abolish authority and who (seemingly) justifies all manner of psychedelic and sexual experimentation; the Blake of the road of excess and the palace of wisdom, the doors of perception and desire, a…

Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting  Dan Hicks (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25) A DECADE INTO THE CULTURE WARS, the argument for decolonising the museum has run out of steam. Nowhere is its critical dead end more evident than in Dan Hicks’s Every Monument Will Fall, a bewildering moralistic call for guilt and hatred of all history. “Dead”, not least because a “mediocre dead white man” haunts the museum where Hicks made his career. “Dead”, because Hicks’s attempt to escape that man’s shadow takes the form of a necrography. “Dead”, because it exorcises this ghost with no interest in the living. The nineteenth-century collector Henry Lane Fox is a dark father figure to ethnography and archaeology. Fox, known as Pitt Rivers in later life, founded the collection, now…

Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self Alexander Douglas (Allen Lane, £20) IN AGAINST IDENTITY PHILOSOPHER ALEXander Douglas asks a provocative question: is identity itself both an illusion and a dangerous imposition? In an age where individual identity is sacred, and we are desperately polarised over identity politics, this line of thinking is perhaps the ultimate taboo. Douglas, below right, argues the invention of identity is both a tragic and a universal story, linking together the seemingly improbable combination of the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the twentiethcentury Catholic thinker René Girard. He starts his narrative with the tale of Hundun. A long time ago there were three emperors, called Shu, Hu, and Hundun. Shu ruled the South, Hu the North, and Hundun’s empire lay in…

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters Diane Coyle (Princeton University Press, £25) David Goodhart is the author of The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality THIS IS AN IMPORTANT AND TIMELYbook on a subject that has for too long been consigned to the fringes of economic and policy thinking: finding a more accurate metric than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to measure economic growth and value. We continue to prostrate ourselves before this statistical idol from the 1940s, despite the fact that it almost comically fails to capture swathes of the modern economy and makes wild guesses (imputations) about much of the rest. This not only induces what could be an unnecessary and self-reinforcing sense of economic failure but also incentivises GDP-fixated politicians to pursue…

The Möbius Book Catherine Lacey (Granta, £16.99) The Girl with the Golden Eyes  Honoré de Balzac, translated by Carol Cosman (NYRB Classics, £14.99) The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories  Mavis Gallant (Pushkin Press, £12.99) John Self is The Critic’s lead fiction critic. He lives in Belfast CATHERINE LACEY IS ONE OF AMERICA’S most interesting authors. Her debut novel Nobody is Ever Missing (2014) had a dreamy flatness that recalled the fiction — once modish, now modern classic — of Joan Didion or Bret Easton Ellis, retooled for a new generation. Her later fiction includes Pew (2020), a religious allegory that resists decoding and Biography of X (2023), an audacious novel masquerading as fact. It’s the last of these that gives us an idea of what would come next. The Möbius Book advertises its…

Norman Lebrecht on Music Will anyone follow the Lieder? ONE MORNING IN 2007 I KNOCKED at the door of a Berlin villa and was admitted by staff. I was shown into a music room whose colour was a dark brown. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was in matching mood. The great Lieder singer had entered a sombre senescence. In our conversation he looked back with regret, not satisfaction. “I achieved too much,” he grumbled. “I left too little for my successors.” In retrospect, he might have been right. A hundred years since his birth, his art form has faded to the edge of awareness. Classic FM bans Lieder from its broadcasts. No new art-songs are being written by any noted composer. You’d never see a young person take a first date to a…

NEARLY 50 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH, Terence Rattigan appears to be having one of his periodic revivals. 2025 has seen a national tour of two of his one-act plays, his masterpiece The Browning Version and the lesser-known Table Number Seven, and the indomitable Rattigan Society is campaigning to have a West End theatre named after him: a campaign that, as this magazine’s theatre critic, I gladly endorse. And now, through serendipity rather than planning, two of the maestro’s plays have just arrived in London. One is a big, starry Theatre Royal Haymarket production of perhaps Rattigan’s most famous work; the other is the estimable Orange Tree’s staging of a rarity that I’ve never seen before. How do they both hold up? Lindsay Posner’s staging of The Deep Blue Sea comes…

THEY’RE NOT KEEN ON D.H. Lawrence in universities these days. In fact he’s not read much anywhere. Too prickly, by half. A member of the Awkward Squad. It’s not just that he is male and white, which can put a target on a fellow’s back. More that the Thought Police can’t place him. In an age of grimly cultivated identities, a protean spirit like Lawrence is unlikely to find much sympathy. “Never trust the teller,” he wrote. “Trust the tale.” Yet too many people care for neither. “Bert”, as he was known, would have been indifferent to their indifference. He spent his life seeking liberation from the shackles of conventional thought. Lawrence always was difficult to place. He wrote three of the greatest twentiethcentury novels, many superb short stories, some…

EACH YEAR I PAY CLOSE ATTENTION to the longlists produced by the RIBA’s Regional Awards published in the spring, which through a complicated process are whittled down over the course of the summer to the announcement of a shortlist for the Stirling Prize awarded in the autumn. It is normally possible to pick out some of the more interesting current projects from the general run of schools, office developments and new housing. This year, my eye was caught by a small-scale office development on the south side of Greville Street, west of the new Farringdon station. It looked like a neo-Edwardian block, intentionally belonging to its surrounding streetscape, designed as if it amalgamated a number of different schemes and looking as if it was built in bronze, as different in…

ONE OF THE MORE SURPRISING developments in the last ten years is the emergence of what I call “Essex Burgundy” — high end Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the county of Ian Dury, Simon Heffer and Denise van Outen. If you want to know what the future holds for English wine, go east, young man! So far, these wines haven’t entered the mainstream but that is changing. The Guardian ran with the headline “Burgundy eat your heart out!” when two Essex wines from Lyme Bay won gold medals at the International Wine Challenge this year. More importantly, Californian giant Jackson Family Wines released its first Essex Burgundy in June with an event at Royal Ascot. Barbara Banke, the firm’s proprietor, owns racehorses as well as vineyards. The wine is called…

THERE’S MUCH TO BE SAID FOR high summer, but for those of us who regularly get up at dawn to shoot deer in the woods, it’s a time of great exhaustion. Light, in June, starts to seep into the sky at about 3.30am, at which point muntjac and roe are at their most active. Those early hours, well before breakfast, are the best if you really want to put carcasses in the larder. I would happily hang up my rifle and recommence proceedings in early autumn when the dew lies heavy and the leaves are turning. But my recent and not-entirely-serious venture — PG Venison and Game Supplies — has been more of a success than I anticipated and the orders have been rolling in thick and fast. “Just one…

ONE FUNCTION OF WORDS IMPORTED FROM other languages is to remind you to enjoy simple pleasures that other cultures care about enough to name. Flâner is an invitation to stroll like a Parisian; craic to laugh with friends like a Dubliner; hygge to cosy up in winter like a Dane. More useful, however, is a borrowing that describes a problem in your own culture that, for lack of a name, is misunderstood. Which brings us to voluntarismo, a word used in political commentary across Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking South America. Dictionaries offer two translations. One is the belief that voluntary associations are the best way to provide social welfare. The other, closer to the mark, refers to a strand of German philosophy that regards the will as more important than the…

Schnapps decision YEVHEN KLOPOTENKO IS MY NEW CULINARY CRUSH. The first Ukrainian to be included in The World’s Best 50 Restaurants, he is also behind the listing of borscht as Ukrainian intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2022. Yevhen’s Kyiv flagship, 100 Rokiv Tomu Vpered (Fast Forward 100 Years) specialises in pre-Soviet Ukrainian dishes, including a lethally delicious smoked pear schnapps, to which I was introduced by Ada Wordsworth, one of the young curators of the Ukraine Pavilion at this year’s Architecture Biennale. Ada is the founder of the charity KHARPP, operating since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Kharkiv Oblast. The inspiration behind KHARPP came from an elderly woman who pointed out to volunteers delivering bread that such donations were useless as her home was in ruins and the…

THE PROTESTORS GOT A SHOCK WHEN THEY went to the pub after demonstrating outside Liverpool Town Hall in March. Around 70 people had come from as far as Somerset and the Netherlands to demand the release of Lucy Letby, the former nurse who is serving 15 whole life sentences for the murder and attempted murder of babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital (CoCH) between June 2015 and June 2016. Inside the town hall, the Thirlwall Inquiry was hearing closing submissions. Outside, demonstrators were singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and waving placards reading “Let her be free” and “Jail all the lying bastards who framed her”. Afterwards, they retired to a nearby Wetherspoons but soon beat a hasty retreat after being sworn at and threatened by angry locals. The confrontation…

UNBOUND WAS LAUNCHED IN 2011 WITH the promise of “a better deal for authors, a better deal for readers” by hirsute publishing veteran John Mitchinson and writers Dan Kieran and Justin Pollard. In March it went into administration owing around £2.4 million to creditors, including over £600,000 to authors, with £1,000 of that debt owed to me. I’m currently in a WhatsApp group for ex-Unbound authors which is a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous: we introduce ourselves then tell our unique but familiar tale of missing money, obfuscating management, and disgruntled readers. Everyone is angry, especially as many of them believed in the Unbound project. The way the model worked, or was meant to work, was that authors would crowdfund the first print run on the Unbound website. Readers were buying…

I DON’T THINK I SHALL EVER RECOVER FROM THE “PRAYER FIST”. IT CAME IN A SERMON A FEW YEARS AGO from a senior Church of England clergyman to a large congregation of hoary-haired church volunteers. “Now,” he said slowly, “I think everyone finds praying difficult, don’t we? But there’s a very good way to help. It’s called ‘the prayer fist’. Everyone now make a fist with their right hand. Has everyone done that? Now, I want you to wiggle your thumb. You give the ‘thumbs up’ with your thumb, so this reminds you to give thanks in prayer … Now wiggle your index finger … You point to things with your index finger … This reminds you to point to things you should be thankful for in prayer … Now, your middle…

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Illumino: A History of Medieval Britain in Twelve Illuminated Manuscripts Michelle P. Brown (Reaktion, £25) Charlotte Gauthier is a historian of late medieval/early modern religious conflict The French novelist François Mauriac supposedly said, “If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he re-reads.” The premise of Michelle Brown’s Illumino is that 12 manuscripts, and how they were read, re-read, transmitted and laboriously copied over the eight centuries she covers, can tell the heart (or at least the history) of medieval Britain. It is an intriguing premise, and one to which the non-specialist reader might wish Brown had stuck. Her work is peopled with a kaleidoscopic cast of hundreds of manuscripts and the people who made, read and distributed them. Though we…

Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the Civil War Minoo Dinshaw (Allen Lane, £30) Paul Lay is senior editor at Engelsberg Ideas THE PROFESSION OF LAW HAS A LOT TOanswer for in the annals of English history. Both Edward “Ned” Hyde and Bulstrode Whitelocke, the “Friends” of Minoo Dinshaw’s fascinating if flawed dual biography, a study of shifting allegiance in the English Civil War, were products of London’s Middle Temple. It was a site of cultivation and erudition, reaching far beyond the legal world, spreading into the proximate London of literary figures such as Ben Jonson. The two ambitious young men were involved in putting on, in 1634, James Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace, a masque for the attention of Charles I and his Catholic Queen, Henrietta Maria. Both became…

True Conservatism: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Arrogant Age Anthony T. Kronman (Yale University Press, £25) CONSERVATIVE THINKERS ARE APT TO invoke Edmund Burke when seeking a foundation for their beliefs and perspectives on the world. Not so Anthony T. Kronman, a professor at Yale Law School. Rather, he believes, we should draw inspiration from an earlier thinker: Baruch Spinoza. This is the conclusion he arrives at in True Conservatism, an expansive exploration of what it means to be a conservative today, and what it should entail in an age of short-termism, intemperance, neophilia and extremism. These prevailing moods are antithetical to the virtues of reflection and compromise, a respect for and knowledge of the past and are all-too-conducive to the fatal temptation to attempt to create a heaven on earth.…

The Dandy: A People’s History of Sartorial Splendour Peter K. Andersson (Oxford University Press, £30) Andrew Cusack is a writer and political adviser I HATE THE DANDY. HE COMES IN MANY IN-carnations and goes by many names — fop, flâneur, etc. — but we all know who he is (it is always a he) and with few exceptions he is overly styled and insufferably irritating. Encyclopaedic in scope, Peter K. Andersson’s The Dandy traces a glittering arc from Regency affectation to New Romantic androgyny — a tour through two centuries of stylistic defiance and fabric-bound flamboyance. He invites us to see the dandy not as a languid litterateur or decadent aristo but as a “subcultural provocateur”. He is at pains to relocate dandyism from aristocratic salons and literary circles to the…

Not long back, the Society of Authors’ journal, The Author, printed what can only be called a jeremiad by a small publisher named Sam Jordison. Mr Jordison, together with his wife Eloise Millar (below, top), run a distinguished independent press whose successes include Eimear McBride’s career-launching A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Louise Ellman’s Booker-shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport, which was ushered onto the Galley Beggar list after its author had been shown the door by messrs Bloomsbury. Galley Beggar are, without doubt, a very good thing. The gist of Mr Jordison’s lament, supported by a great deal of forensic detail, was that the economics of publishing had become so skewed that it was all but impossible for him to make a profit. Rising print and paper costs, not to mention…

FINGERS ON BUZZERS … TIME FOR this month’s opera quiz! Question one: which upcoming show do you reckon this could be, slinking poutily towards us, batting its eyelids and generally giving it the big old come-on … with sexy promises of “violence, murder and traumatic childbirth”? Hmm, maybe a musical version of one of those family faves like The Romans in Britain, or could it be some romantic friperie by Edward Bond or Sarah Kane? Indeed no! — sadly it’s not Blasted: the Opera with naked oil-smeared punks in some foetid Dalston dungeon, but rather Handel’s spirited and joyous social satire Semele, popping up at Covent Garden from 30 June, a comedy not generally known (until now!) for its rapes and eye-gouging. Ah well. As has been noted, the Lord…

FOR THE PRODUCERS, IT WAS AN obvious project. Peter Benchley’s book about a beach resort menaced by a great white shark had gripped them as they read it. Afterwards, one of them commented that, had they read it a second time, they’d have realised it was unfilmable. It’s 50 years since Jaws hit cinemas, becoming the first summer blockbuster. Before it was a famous success, it was a famous disaster, a bet on a young director that ran wildly over budget, a project planned around a mechanical model of a monster that was such a mess when the crew tried to film it that it barely appeared in the final movie. THE DELIGHTFUL BRITISH COMEDY FOCUSES ON THE BIG STUFF: LOVE, AMBITION, GRIEF, DISAPPOINTMENT Watching the film now, it can…

A CRITIC, KENNETH TYNAN CLAIMED, is someone who knows the way but doesn’t know how to drive. In that spirit, I must reluctantly admit that I would be an awful podcaster — moody, unfocused and disorganised. Actually, I’m not even a good podcast guest. But if you’re appearing on a podcast you might benefit from some advice on what you shouldn’t do. 1. DON’T BE HUNGOVER This might sound obvious. Alas, for your humble critic it has been more difficult to learn than Polish grammar. Here’s the problem: as an expat, I often do podcasts when I’m visiting Britain. But I’m often visiting Britain to attend parties. Podcasting before the parties would be sensible. For whatever reason, though, I have sometimes ended up rolling out of bed with a mouth…

An editor at one of Britain’s highest-circulation dailies wrote to me last week asking for a piece on “mum guilt”. It was one of those moments when you think “Oh, is that still here?” Like Love Island and Banksy’s art, the word “literally” and Anna Wintour, perhaps you haven’t checked in for a while, but there they are, doing their thing. Still. Obviously, someone believes there’s a few dregs of interest to be squeezed from “mum guilt”, but really, must we? Ditto the “Girls’ Night Out”. Why is this grim phrase still with us? What imaginary domestic bonds are we shaking off, what office-to-bar transformations are we effecting with a cunning statement necklace and a slick of Ruby Woo, what high jinks are to be plotted after three cheeky Cosmos…

THE INTERNATIONAL ART market is enduring a lengthy “correction”. The post-pandemic froth having evaporated, global auction sales — the only reliable and publicly available sales data — are down for the second year in a row. Today, at the top end of the market there are fewer buyers, and less competition for the most expensive works. Inevitably, vendors and buyers’ price expectations are mismatched. This was brutally demonstrated when in May, Giacometti’s monumental bronze head Grande tête mince (left) failed to sell at Sotheby’s New York. Priced to sell in excess of $70 million, the work was one of a set of five casts. Another had sold in 2013 for $50m (exceeding its $35-$50m estimate) and in 2025 Sotheby’s pushed the estimate hard (perhaps to win the business), and the…

LAST MONTH I WROTE ABOUT HOW RACING MISSES so many opportunities to market the sport, usually focusing on anything but racing itself. Right on cue, here comes a new video from Great British Racing, the sport’s marketing arm. It’s part of a five-month, £3.62 million marketing campaign. I can confidently assert that it’s the only video associated with racing — the only anything associated with racing, in fact — that begins with someone saying “Hey, girl”. And that’s the high point of the 40-second ad, which focuses on pretty much everything about a day at the races except what actually is the point of racing for most fans: horses and betting. I’m being unfair to the people behind the ad, because they’re hardly the first to ignore betting as one of…

PRINCES OF THE CRICKET SQUARE OPINION IS DIVIDED ON WHAT TO CALL the silverware that the Test cricketers of England and India are contesting this summer. Will the home side’s most prolific wicket-taker or the tourists’ heaviest run-scorer get top billing? The Indian press and BBC went for the Tendulkar-Anderson Trophy; Cricinfo preferred Anderson-Tendulkar. Knowing the money-obsessed world of modern cricket administration it will probably become the Tendulkar-Anderson Trophy Adornment in order to get sponsored by an Indian steel company. No one disputes that they deserve the honour. Sir James Anderson’s 188 Tests is beaten only by Sachin Tendulkar’s 200. The Englishman took 704 wickets, the most by a seam bowler; the Indian scored a record 15,921 runs. Tendulkar hit seven Test centuries against England; Anderson took six five-wicket hauls…