
Literary Review – March 2023 issue:
Our Man in Ajmer
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire By Nandini Das
Slow Boat to China
Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning By Edward Weech

Literary Review – March 2023 issue:
Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire By Nandini Das
Chinese Dreams in Romantic England: The Life and Times of Thomas Manning By Edward Weech

Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (March 3, 2023) – Peter Frankopan likes to take the long view. In The Silk Roads (2015) Oxford University’s professor of global history argued that the Persian Empire and its trade routes were central to the rise of western civilization, not, as traditionally thought, Rome, Greece and Egypt. In The Earth Transformed Frankopan’s timeline is considerably longer: he looks at climate change since the formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago.
Euripidean revenge tragedies that continue to trouble us
A revelatory account of the North Sea flood of 1953


The Drift Magazine – February 28, 2023 Issue – We called it heterosexual oppression. Like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch.
Through a growing focus on healthcare monitoring in recent years, Apple has positioned its wearables as essential accessories for the technophile and the casual hypochondriac alike.
Like so many other predictions of collapse, exaggerated. Methylphenidate for Miriam. Two executives showed up for a meeting dressed as Woody and Buzz Lightyear. A source of revolutionary Marxist critiques, an outright conservative, a peddler of flimsy conspiracy theories. Some days I am so filled with myself I can see nothing. I am not going to apologize for the empire, for our history. Bravissima! Stealth, he kept no socials. She had martini-glass tits. In this city every boy is an isotope. Enter among the truly civilized peoples. Cruising for difference. The body of a bear, the nose of an elephant, the paws of a tiger, the tail of an ox, and needle-like hairs. Wainscoting for an all-knowing liberalism. How can a narrow regional tabloid claim itself The World? The surrealist didn’t prescribe life-sized butter ears. Spend how you want the sixtyish years you have left of your life.
“Italian language teaching is back in Somalia!” the Italian embassy in Somalia tweeted in late September 2021, announcing a new program at the Somali National University that would reintroduce the language of the country’s former colonizer.

Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (February 24, 2023) features Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the US and the First World War; @SarahJLonsdale on Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby; @nicolaupsonbook on Josephine Tey; @MirandaFrance1 on the Condor trials; @cesca_peacock on Poets in Vogue – and more.
London Review of Books (LRB) – March 2, 2023 issue:
All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. We are shaped by individual, consequential but highly contingent acts of care, or their absence.
Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care by Madeleine Bunting
The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? by Emma Dowling
Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet by Nancy Fraser
It is one of the curious qualities of the lighthouse that while its raison d’être is to be visible, durable and stable in the most adverse conditions, it is often seen as a site of ambiguity and insecurity.

The New Yorker – February 27, 2023 issue:
Many groups who identify as Indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples; many who did come first don’t claim to be Indigenous. Can the concept escape its colonial past?
As unrest roils the country, a controversial figure from the far right helps Benjamin Netanyahu hold on to power.
When the country’s mining industry collapsed, a criminal economy grew in its place, with thousands of men climbing into some of the deepest shafts in the world, searching for leftover gold.

The New Yorker – February 13 & 20, 2023:
Now ninety, Lady Glenconner—a trusted friend of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret—has become a cheeky chronicler of the British élite.
Everyone seems to feel like they’re faking it. But, as the concept has spread, so has the criticism.
After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act.


Literary Review – February 2023 Issue:
Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China’s Cultural Revolution
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning By Nigel Biggar
Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler By R T Howard\

The New York Review of Books February 23, 2023 issue:
In Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, human figures often seem outgrowths of their architectural surroundings.
Edward Hopper’s New York an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023
Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.
The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.
All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything by Claire Harman

This week’s @TheTLS , featuring Ferdinand Mount on fair play; @ScurrRuth on Janet Malcolm; @sophieolive on Mina Loy; @mjohnharrison on László Krasznahorkai; @pratinavanil on Nehru; @jamesamarcus on Melville and Mumford; @eliza_dearnley on pagan goddesses – and more.