Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Country Life Magazine – November 27, 2024 Preview

Country Life Magazine (November 26, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Advent Calendar Special’…

The master builder

Carla Passino is captivated by floral photographs that evoke 17th-century still-life paintings

A little mite with a mighty heart

She may be tiny, but Jenny wren certainly makes her presence felt, declares Mark Cocker

Worth its weight in gold

There’s more to myrrh than meets the eye, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee

Now that packs a punch

Lucien de Guise is bowled over by the intoxicating concoctions mixed by Dickens and George IV

Pie say!

Neil Buttery tucks into the tale of the Yorkshire Christmas Pye

Christmas gifts

Pick out those perfect presents with a helping hand from Hetty Lintell and Amie Elizabeth White

Mayara Magri’s favourite painting

The Royal Ballet dancer selects an inspiring, transformative work

Hardy and the country house

The author’s Wessex is brought to life in Jeremy Musson’s words and Matthew Rice’s drawings

Beauty by numbers

Deborah Nicholls-Lee is fascinated by fractals, the exquisite, ever-repeating patterns in Nature

The fall of Albion

John Lewis-Stempel urges us to rediscover our love of heathland, now a rarer habitat than rainforest

Get a Grip

Andrew Green rounds up the animals in Dickens’s life and work

First out of the lychgate

Jack Watkins explores the folklore and function of the lychgate

Little things that make a big difference

Our guide to entertaining in style

Thank you for the memories

From flying a Spitfire to sushi-making, the COUNTRY LIFE team puts gift experiences to the test

The legacy

Kate Green reveals how Sir David Willcocks changed the sound of Christmas with Carols for Choirs

Luxury

Hetty Lintell on saunas, socks, silk bows and precious stones

Now we’re just some gadgets that you used to know

Neil Buttery sorts the pudding prick from the tongue press

Lid pro quo

Rob Crossan talks Tupperware

Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson on cabbage

It’s always darkest before the dawn

A black fox illuminates a dreary dawn for John Lewis-Stempel

Let’s go to the movies

Victoria Marston looks back at classic film posters

It takes the biscuit

Matthew Dennison explores the tin-novations that made Huntley & Palmers a household name

Forever a chorister

Sarah Sands shares how choral singing shaped the life of her late brother Kit Hesketh-Harvey

 ‘What a good boy am I’

Ian Morton investigates the real meanings of our nursery rhymes

The great astral sneeze

Harry Pearson finds out why this is the year of the Northern Lights

Country Life Magazine – November 20, 2024 Preview

Country Life Magazine (November 20, 2024): The latest issue features Winston Churchill – The wit and wisdom of the great man…

‘Let us go forward together’

As we approach the 150th anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s birthday, Amie Elizabeth White and Octavia Pollock pay homage to the great man, in his own words.

Entertaining His Majesty

In the second of two articles, John Goodall charts the 1560s and 1620s expansion of Apethorpe Palace in Northamptonshire

Landscape of ‘seamless sameness’

England’s heather moorland and its glorious purple swathe is a wonder of the Western world, suggest John Lewis-Stempel

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Do you know a Yonerywander from a Vinvertuperator? Engage your inner Edward Lear as Daniel McKay welcomes you into his wacky world of whimwondery

Wibble wobble, wibble wobble, jelly made of paint

Food, glorious food is fuelling the creativity of modern still-life artists discovers Catriona Gray

Sex, lies and sewing machines

The sewing machine rose to be an emblem of domesticity, but its invention is a story of Saints and Singers. Matthew Dennison follows the thread

Interiors

Raze to the ground or renovate? Has the open-plan layout had its day? Cart shed or garage? Giles Kime considers some key architectural conundrums

Wisley reinvented

John Hoyland is captivated by the spectacular transformation of Piet Oudolf’s double borders at the RHS garden in Surrey

Some like it hot

If you like your chili ‘hotter than the hinges of hell’, Tom Parker Bowles has just the dish for you (and there’s not a bean in sight)

Wooden walls restored

John Goodall lauds a decade-long project to rescue a unique painted church at Ursi, Romania

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov. 22, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (November 20, 2024): The latest issue features The Uncommon Reader’ – Virginia Woolf in literary tradition..

What we want from her books

Virginia Woolf as reader, writer and literary inspiration By Sophie Oliver

A star is torn

The unravelling of Vivien Leigh’s marriage amid her mental health breakdown By Vanessa Curtis

Ignorant armies

History as an ideological battleground By Niall Ferguson

Bergson’s boom and bust

How the world’s most famous thinker fell out of fashion By Mark Sinclair

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion -December 2024

The New Criterion – The December 2024 issue features

Art: a special section

An interview with an Old Masters dealer by Benjamin Riley

Monet reversionism by Paul Hayes Tucker

Tokens of culture by James Panero

Politics & the Venice Biennale by Philip Rylands

A monumental park by Michele H. Bogart

Ghiberti versus Donatello by Eric Gibson

The New York Review Of Books – December 5, 2024

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The New York Review of Books (November 14, 2024) The latest issue features The Second Coming – Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

The Second Coming

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America. By Erin Maglaque

Soundscapes of the Silenced

In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

“A Veil of Silence: Women and Sound in Renaissance Italy” by Julia Rombough

In Search of Fullness

In his new book, the philosopher Charles Taylor looks at modern poetry as a unique record of spiritual experience in a secular age.

“Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” by Charles Taylor

London Review Of Books – November 21, 2024 Preview

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London Review of Books (LRB) – November 14 , 2024: The latest issue features ‘The Democrats’ Defeat’….

The Democrats’ Defeat

By Adam Tooze

‘Being the party of normality has its appeal, but it reinforces precisely the wrong instinct. The polycrisis that is unfolding demands not a return to the status quo but urgent, progressive answers both at home and abroad. To formulate and articulate those, the Democrats need politicians, not algorithms. They need personalities capable of responding to the profound questions facing contemporary America.’

Ukraine’s Battle Fatigue

James Meek

‘Would the army as a whole rise up against a government that made territorial concessions to Russia? Perhaps. But the more widely the recruiters spread their net, the more the army reflects a society that is starting to talk openly, if bitterly, about swapping land for peace.’


Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border 
by Ieva Jusionyte

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason de León

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov. 15, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (November 13, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Books of the Year’ – TLS writers choose their favourites…

Strings of her heart

A cellist is haunted by the history of her instrument By Norma Clarke

Neighbourhood watch

Frank Auerbach and his visions of north London By Rod Mengham

Who is the real puppet?

A spectacular production of Offenbach’s opéra fantastique By Paul Griffiths

Country Life Magazine – November 6, 2024 Preview

Country Life Magazine (November 5, 2024): The latest issue features

The legacy

Kate Green salutes Lt-Col John McCrae for giving us the poppy as a symbol of remembrance

Fake it ’til you make it

Nature’s mimics and frauds are full of cunning survival tricks, as Laura Parker discovers

Gentleman’s Life

  • Simon Mills walks a wardrobe tightrope
  • Matthew Dennison charts the rise and fall of the waistband
  • Hetty Lintell’s pick of the latest fashions in orange, brown, pink and more
  • Harry Pearson finds there’s nothing like a ’tache to divide opinion
  • Nicholas Foulkes marvels at rare métiers d’art timepieces
  • Jonathan Self examines the allure of the exotic menagerie
  • Tom Parker Bowles savours oysters, the food of love

Emma Ridgway’s favourite painting

The Foundling Museum director selects a captivating, life-size portrait of performing choir girls

The Sound and the Fury

Carla Carlisle tries to look on the sunny side, but remains on the alert for ‘tragedy and trouble’

Nine towers on high

John Martin Robinson examines two Lancashire powerhouses: Lathom House and Knowsley Hall

London Life

  • Get your skates on at Somerset House
  • Jo Rodgers seeks out the best Sunday roasts
  • William Hosie toasts London pubs

A life lived, a dream dreamt

Inscriptions etched by soldiers are a window into the First World War, suggests David Crossland

Are you feeling Broad-minded?

The wondrous wetlands of East Anglia are a marshy, manmade marvel for John Lewis-Stempel

Whispers of winter

Lia Leendertz weighs up the chances of an Indian summer

Conversations on conservation

A 1974 country-house revolution was a major turning point for our old buildings, says Simon Jenkins

Digging for victory and veg

The Anderson shelter was a war-time lifesaver in more ways than one, reveals Russell Higham

Interiors

Bright ideas with Amelia Thorpe

Swaying in rhythm

Tilly Ware applauds the bold planting in The Old Vicarage garden at Wormingford, Essex

Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson harnesses the nutritious punch of cauliflower

Foraging

John Wright urges caution as he extols the virtues of blewits, the most tasty of wild mushrooms

Travel

  • Rosie Paterson shares the latest in luxury travel news
  • Mark Hedges celebrates a mile-stone birthday in style at a villa in Mallorca
  • Pamela Goodman gets a buzz on a Spanish holiday

The bare Bone

Mary Miers assesses the career of Sir Muirhead Bone, the first of Britain’s Official War Artists

Books: Literary Review Magazine – November 2024

Literary Review – November 2, 2024: The latest issue features ‘The Making of Handel’s Messiah’; Another Side of Plath; Legends of El Cid; Germany Stalls and Smiley Returns…

Oratorio of Oratorios – Freya Johnston

Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah By Charles King

Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen

What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost By Orlando Reade

Nazis, Porn & Punting

Tom Sharpe: A Personal Memoir By Piers Brendon

The New York Review Of Books – November 21, 2024

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The New York Review of Books (October 31, 2024) The latest issue features Coco Fusco on yearning to breathe free, Elaine Blair on Rachel Cusk, Fintan O’Toole on Trump’s predations, Ruth Bernard Yeazell on John Singer Sargent, Michelle Nijhuis on the disasters wrought by remaking nature for human ends, Clair Wills on Janet Frame, Andrew Raftery on the Declaration of Independence, Rozina Ali on evangelical missionaries in Afghanistan and Iraq, A.S. Hamrah on the Trump biopic, Tim Parks on Nathaniel Hawthorne, poems by John Kinsella and Emily Berry, and much more.

The Crime of Human Movement

Two recent books about our immigration system reveal its long history of exploiting vulnerable individuals for financial gain.

Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien” by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States by Ana Raquel Minian

Life in the Ruins

Two new books consider the delusion of the human quest to be free from the constraints of nature.

The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown

Iran Exposed

The Islamic Republic’s sordid proxy war with the West may now be leaving it open to an all-out attack as Israel attempts to eliminate its enemies throughout the region.