Tag Archives: Books

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

Image

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

Times Literary Supplement – April 25, 2025 Preview

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (April 23, 2025): The latest issue features ‘The Blakean Spark’ – The artist’s ‘Imaginative Eye’…