Tag Archives: Book Reviews

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

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.

The New York Reviews Of Books – May 15, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (April 24, 2025): The latest issue features the Art Issue—with Susan Tallman on warp and weft, Ingrid D. Rowland on Vitruvius, Jerome Groopman on antivaccine lunacy, Martin Filler on the new Frick, Julian Bell on art in an age of crisis, Lisa Halliday on Claire Messud, Heather O’Donnell on the Morgan librarian, Noah Feldman on the rule of law, Jarrett Earnest on fancy furnishings, Madeleine Thien on Fang Fang, Coco Fusco on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jed Perl on Surrealism, poems by Ben Lerner and Carmen Boullosa, and much more.

String Theory

Two exhibitions focused on weaving go beyond the functional, the folkloric, and the feminine, tracking fiber’s escape from the connotations of the grid.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction – an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, April 20–September 13, 2025

Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art – An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Vitruvius & the Warlords

Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes.

All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes by Indra Kagis McEwen

Measles Gone Wild

During a burgeoning measles outbreak, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to make contradictory remarks, publicly endorsing the measles vaccine while raising doubts about its safety.

Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health by Adam Ratner

So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease by Thomas Levenson

The Frick Reinvigorated

In an ambitious and long-overdue renovation, the architect Annabelle Selldorf attempted to harmonize with the Frick’s Classical aesthetic while asserting her Modernist credentials.

A Century of Surrealism

One hundred years after André Breton launched the Surrealist movement, we’re still trying making sense of its aims and effects.

Surrealism – an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 4, 2024–January 13, 2025, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 8, 2025–February 6, 2026

Manifestoes of Surrealism by André Breton, translated from the French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane

Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Revised and Updated Edition by Mark Polizzotti

Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School by Martica Sawin

Surrealism and Painting by André Breton, translated from the French by Simon Watson Taylor, with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti

The New Criterion ——– May 2025 Preview

About | The New Criterion

THE NEW CRITERION (April 16, 2025): The latest issue features…

The crime of noticing

On the writings of Renaud Camus. by Douglas Murray

There at “The New Yorker”

On A Century of Fiction in “The New Yorker”: 1925–2025, edited by Deborah Treisman. by Bruce Bawer

By measure he lived

On the great English architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. by Harry Adams

The whispers of Joseph Joubert

On Paul Auster’s translation of the French aphorist. by Mark LaFlaur

Times Literary Supplement – April 18, 2025 Preview

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 16, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Plays for Today’ – On what makes Shakespeare great; Miracles of Siena; Conversations about Gaza; Cyber insecurity and a Letter from Greenland…

Times Literary Supplement – April 11, 2025 Preview

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 9, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Burning Spitit’ – On capturing Dante; Dickens’s feverish imagination…

The New York Review Of Books – April 24, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (April 3, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Spring Books’….

Charting an Unheroic Past

With her densely textured, ambitious, and deeply collaborative scholarship, the historian Catherine Hall has transformed public discourse about slavery.

Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism by Catherine Hall

The 176-Year Argument

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

Lunar Myths and Mysteries

Two new books explore our growing scientific understanding of the moon as well as its powerful appeal to the imagination.

Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps, and Matter edited by Matthew Shindell, with a foreword by Dava Sobel

Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle

Times Literary Supplement – April 4, 2025 Preview

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 2, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Art and Lifestyle’ – On visual culture in the era of AI…

A bad business

Recalculating the economic gains of slavery By Padraic X. Scanlan

Raging bull

Rejecting the narrative of Picasso the monster to women By Lisa Hilton

Rebirth of the modern

The future of art and artists in the era of artificial intelligence By Aaron Peck

Writer, lawyer, banker, cleaner

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s tale of four women – and many social ills By Houman Barekat

Books: Literary Review – April 2025 Preview

LITERARY REVIEW (April 1, 2025): The April 2025 issue features ‘Henry James Goes West’; Russia’s Secret Wars’ Josephine Baker Uncovered; Besotted With Blake and Tale of Two America’s…

Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll

The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West By Shaun Walker

The Restless Analyst

Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age By Peter Brooks

On Writers and Writing: Selected Essays By Henry James (Edited by Michael Gorra)

Merger or Acquisition?

Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America By Russell Shorto

London Review Of Books – April 3, 2025 Preview

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (March 26, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Regime Change in the West’; Marvelous Mavis Gallant; Executive Order 14168; Long Ling visits the new Bejing…


Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter 
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson


Normandy: The Sailors’ Story 
by Nick Hewitt

D-Day, the Oral History: The Turning Point of World War Two by the People Who Were There by Garrett M. Graff

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 by Karl Marx, edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter, translated by Paul Reitter