Elephant • 23rd February 2021 The Unexpected Solace of Art Books Under Lockdown With many museums around the world closed, lavishly illustrated books can offer a tangible experience of art that doesn’t involve leaving the house.
The Economist • 13th January 2021 The Royal Court takes inspiration from the Federal Theatre Project Lessons from an artistic programme set up during the Depression are being applied at a British playhouse
The Economist • 17th December 2020 Saki was one of the greatest satirists of Christmas Born 150 years ago, Saki was a master of social observation who sided with life’s rebels
The Economist • 7th May 2020 Podcast Interview On The Economist's 'The Intelligence' podcast, I discussed the 150th anniversary of the Met Museum
Times Literary Supplement • 7th May 2020 Podcast Interview On the TLS podcast, I discussed my review of Judith Flanders' 'A Place for Everything' with Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi
Times Literary Supplement • 30th April 2020 Accident of initial letters Review of 'A Place for Everything: The curious history of alphabetical order' by Judith Flanders
The Economist • 14th April 2020 A sober sesquicentennial for the Met Museum Though the 150th birthday celebrations will be muted, the occasion is an opportunity to reflect on a great institution’s history
Prospect • 19th February 2020 "Book murderer": Why debates on the way we treat our books aren't actually about reading Why do people cleave so strongly to one side or another of the bibliographical culture war?
The Times Literary Supplement • 15th December 2019 Spiky and descending David Rundle's 'The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain' contains several strokes of adept codicology
The Economist • 11th December 2019 Nativity plays occupy a vexed place in Britain’s national psyche Rather like horror movies, nativities have reflected Britons’ fears
The Times Literary Supplement • 25th October 2019 Barn burner, axe, death growl, metalhead On the art, temperament and ideology of the indexer
The Times Literary Supplement • 18th October 2019 Animals endowed with reason A collection of correspondence revealing the surprisingly privileged lives of 18th-century Huguenots
The Economist • 8th October 2019 How nightclubs and cabarets incubated radical art From the 1880s to the 1960s, cosmopolitan hangouts helped foster the avant-garde
The Times Literary Supplement • 28th September 2019 Jostling atoms How to break down the structure of a book
The Economist • 1st August 2019 The variegated symbolism of gardens in art Rarely are they neutral spaces, as a new exhibition in Berlin shows
The Times Literary Supplement • 7th May 2019 Republic of letters The vast publishing output of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century
The Economist • 3rd May 2019 A new adaptation of “Small Island” tells Britons their nation’s story “Small Island”—adapted from a novel by Andrea Levy that was published in 2004—unpicks the complex, vicious tangle of power relations between coloniser and colonised, insider and outsider
1843 • 24th April 2019 The personal trauma that lies behind Edvard Munch’s unnerving art He was fascinated by psychology and haunted by mental collapse
The Economist • 18th April 2019 An intriguing new adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” The risk of staging a play about ennui is the possibility of instilling the same feelings in the audience
1843 • 1st March 2019 The Elizabethan age in miniature A new exhibition shows how two master miniaturists of the 16th century – Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver – captured their era