Category Archives: Books

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JUNE 8, 2025

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: The latest issue features ‘Money Problems’…

A Chronicle of the Rich Getting Richer, Crasser and More Obscene

In “The Haves and Have-Yachts,” the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos presents an urbane set of profiles in excess.

Crime Fiction Filled With Dark Passages and Dark Hearts

Our columnist on the month’s most notable releases.

Worried the World Is Falling Apart? That’s OK. It’s Happened Before.

In “The Once and Future World Order,” by Amitav Acharya, and “The Golden Road,” by William Dalrymple, our best hope might be that history repeats itself.

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – JUNE 26, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (June 5, 2025): The latest issue features ‘University Press Issue’…

My Freedom, My Choice

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.

The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life by Sophia Rosenfeld

Translation’s Drift

Two books look closely at both the limitations and the possibilities of the art of literary translation.

The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls

Speaking in Tongues by J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos

What Do You Expect?

The surprising power of placebos demonstrates how the mind influences both the experience of ill health and the evolution of illness.

Placebos by Kathryn T. Hall

The Power of Placebos: How the Science of Placebos and Nocebos Can Improve Health Care by Jeremy Howick

LITERARY REVIEW JUNE 2025

LITERARY REVIEW (June 2, 2025): The latest issue features ‘ A.C. Benson Unleashed; Into the Manosphere; Yours, Virginia Woolf; Passions of Gwen John and Apple’s Dangerous Deal…

Land of Dopes & Tories – The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson

To the Postbox – The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

Guys & Trolls – Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere

By James Bloodworth

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – MAY 30, 2025 PREVIEW

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (May 28, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Their dollar, our problem’ – America’s crumbling financial empire…

“The dollar plays a similar role to that of the English language in global commerce”, writes Edward Chancellor in his lead review of three books devoted to American financial supremacy. “Both enjoy network effects: the more they are used, the more others are obliged to use them.”

By Martin Ivens

King Dollar’s shaky throne and fall    

Can the world’s dominant currency survive Donald Trump?

By Edward Chancellor

‘Literature is the antidote to numbness’

What questions should today’s writers and artists be asking? Responses from authors at the Hay Festival and the

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – JUNE 5, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (May 28, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Leopold’s Legacy’; Politics of Resentment and Murder Most Delicious…

Daniel Trilling

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation by Richard Seymour

Letters

Galen Strawson, Rachel Hammersley, Colin McArthur, Jeremy Whiteley, Richard Davenport-Hines, Terry Hanstock, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, George Anderson, Koldo Casla, Martin Rose

Ed Kiely

Short Cuts: University Finances

Susan Pedersen

Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Neal Ascherson

A Quiet Evening: The Travels of Norman Lewis by Norman Lewis, introduced and selected by John Hatt

Jeremy Harding

Paths to Restitution

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – MAY 29, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (May 8, 2025): The latest issue features…

‘There’s Nothing for Me Here’

What caused Venezuela’s collapse, and who is responsible? A recent memoir tells the story as so many families have lived it.

Motherland: The Disintegration of a Family in a Collapsed Venezuela by Paula Ramón, with translations by Julia Sanches and Jennifer Shyue

Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela by William Neuman

The Spy in the Jeu de Paume

The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.

The Art Front: The Defense of French Collections, 1939–1945 by Rose Valland, translated from the French by Ophélie Jouan, with a foreword by Robert M. Edsel


Doing Their Own Research

An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.

Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker

Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – MAY 9, 2025 PREVIEW

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (May 7, 2025): The latest issue features ‘The Other America’ – The Hispanic Achievement…

Putting the blame on Spain

Why Anglo-American colonialism has no claim to moral superiority

Behind the velvet rope

The former editor of Vanity Fair looks back on an era of excess

Night visions

Fantastic gloomth: Victor Hugo the artist

Literary Review – May 2025 Arts & Books Preview

LITERARY REVIEW (May 1, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Mad About Diana’…

Kind Hearts & Coronets

Dianaworld: An Obsession By Edward White

Descartes Be Damned

Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World By Graham Tomlin

Start the Presses!

Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books By Eric Marshall White

The European Review Of Books – Spring 2025

THE EUROPEAN REVIEW OF BOOKS (May 1, 2025): The latest issue features …Around the world in strawberry red. Schengen’s pseudo-borderless « Europe ». A day in Minsk & an eternity at the border. A trip through Syria’s now-uninhabited terror apparatus (archivists needed). Cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, agricultural-novelists in Switzerland & France, tree-huggers in The Hague

Double negative

Our first piece from Issue Eight, out from behind the paywall! « It’s best to go into Schengen’s history unshocked by contradiction. by George Blaustein

The shortest, longest bus trip

Travelogue of a day in Minsk & an eternity at the EU border. Paula Domingo Pasarin

On learning to hate chickens

Two novelists (one Swiss, one Spanish) sign up for agricultural jobs. Tania Roettger

Bethlehem, Jericho & a view of Jerusalem

A Palestinian writer mentally retreats to three unreadable cities. by Karim Kattan

London Review Of Books – May 2, 2025 Preview

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TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 30, 2025): In the period of extravagant mourning that followed Princess Diana’s death, the human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy complained that the country had entered “an era in which the public had lost its capacity for rational thought”.

Dangerous Chimera

Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal 
by Quentin Skinner.

Red Pants on Sundays

The Maverick’s Museum: Albert Barnes and His American Dream 
by Blake Gopnik.

It’s a shitshow

Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, the Failure, the Legacy  by Tim Lankester.