TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (March 12, 2025): The latest issue features ‘The Only Way Is Down’ – On hopeful pessimism; The death of a poet in war; On democracy; Did museums purchase or plunder and Crippen’s crimes…

Cold comfort farm        

Hope, despair and retreat in an unquiet age By Kieran Setiya

Taking up the cross

The crusades in the English literary imagination By David Abulafia

Not just a man’s war

The role of women in crusading history

Under the patriarchy

Sixty years of turmoil in Egypt