THE NEW CRITERION MAGAZINE (February 14, 2025): The latest issue features…
The New Criterion – March 2025 Preview
Tag Archives: Reviews
The Guardian Weekly – February 14, 2025 Preview
THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY (February 13, 2025): The latest issue features The Orbánisation of America…
We’re just over three weeks into the second Donald Trump administration, and the pace of events both inside and outside the US has been dizzying and unprecedented.
Many of us have been alarmed by Trump’s shocking pronouncements on the Israel-Gaza war, trade tariffs and territorial claims on Greenland and Panama. But inside America, an equally startling transformation has been taking place.
Aided by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump has moved swiftly to fire critics, reward allies, punish media, gut the federal government and exploit presidential immunity. Yet much of the blueprint comes not from Trump’s own policy team, but from a power-consolidation playbook established over the past decade by the Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán.
London Review Of Books – February 20, 2025 Preview
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 12, 2025): The latest issue features Clair Wills on Marion Milner; Deaths in Custody; Adam Shatz on Messiaen’s Ecstasies; Bee Wilson looks in the fridge and Christopher Clark defends Merkel…
Marion Milner’s Method – Clair Wills
Marion Milner believed in the importance of creative fulfilment (the ‘genius’ inside every one of us) and offered a kind of manual for finding it. From her earliest self-experiments through decades of psychoanalytic practice she took seriously the need to feel ‘real in living’, and tried to theorise the therapeutic potential of aesthetic experience, however minimal.
Deaths in Custody – Dani Garavelli
William had spent most of his life in the care of the state. His story was one of intergenerational trauma, common to many families in the West of Scotland, and of the lies Scotland tells itself about its treatment of its most vulnerable young people.
Merkel’s Two Lives – Christopher Clark
Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe.
Messiaen’s Ecstasies – Adam Shatz
While few would question Messiaen’s importance in 20th-century music, his religious modernism has always been met with accusations of idolatry, inauthenticity and bad taste.
Country Life Magazine – February 12, 2025 Preview
COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE (February 11, 2025): ‘The Fine Art Issue’ features ‘What makes an Old Master?’….
Let the art rule the head
The UK’s status as a world leader in creative industries will be in peril if we fail to nurture art-and-design skills in our schools, argues Tristram Hunt
Let’s fall in love
Laura Parker investigates the boxing, croaking, crooning, dad dancing and even murder that passes for courtship ritual in the animal kingdom
Beauty and the blimp
Could a new airship designed in Britain deliver eco-friendly aviation, asks Charles Harris
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe picks out glass acts in world of garden rooms, greenhouses and orangeries
Soup-er charged
Tom Parker Bowles reveals how to beef up a boozy, hot-as-Hades French onion soup
A leap in the dark
The play of light and shade has long defined Western art. Michael Hall examines what Constable called ‘the chiaroscuro of nature’
The Duke of Richmond’s favourite painting
The owner of Goodwood picks a work that reflects the sporting history of the West Sussex estate
Three wishes for food and farming
Minette Batters calls for the UK to set a self-sufficiency target for producing its own food
Nature and nurture
In the final article of a three-part series, Tim Richardson ponders the innovation and imagination behind the wonderful grounds at Bramham Park, West Yorkshire
The legacy
Amie Elizabeth White applauds altruistic John Ritchie Findlay, who paved the way for Scotland’s National Portrait Gallery
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell backs a winner with a range of horseshoe jewellery
Light work
Tiffany Daneff is dazzled by the transformation of a dark London garden into a light-filled oasis
Foraging
Winter mushrooms are a rarity, but the striking velvet shank earns John Wright’s approval as a welcome addition to game pie
Arts & antiques
Carla Passino marvels at the masterpieces amassed by Swiss collector Oskar Reinhart as the works go on show in London
Wick me up before you go-go
The wick trimmer’s work was never done in candlelit times, discovers Matthew Dennison
The New York Times Book Review – February 9, 2025
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 8, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Stages Of Life’…
5 New Books We Recommend This Week
Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.
25 Years Ago, Joan Didion Kept a Diary. It’s About to Become Public.
The notes, taken after meetings with her psychiatrist, will be published in April as a book, “Notes to John.” They provide a raw account of her life, her work and her complex relationship with her daughter.
How Big Tech Mined Our Attention and Broke Our Politics
“Superbloom,” by Nicholas Carr, and “The Sirens’ Call,” by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, argue that we are ill equipped to handle the infinite scroll of the information age.
The New York Review Of Books – February 27, 2025
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS (February 7, 2025): The latest issue features The Prophet Business…
The Prophet Business
A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson
There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.
A Daring Departure
Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism by Sebastian Smee
Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment – an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 26–July 14, 2024, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 8, 2024–January 19, 2025
One hundred and fifty years after Impressionist paintings were first exhibited, it takes a certain effort to recover their original radicalism.
Rebooting the Pentagon
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff
Bringing Silicon Valley’s drive for innovation to defense contracting has been a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has led tech firms to plunge into the war business.
The New Statesman Magazine — February 2025
THE NEW STATESMAN (February 5, 2025): The latest issue features ‘The New Gods of AI’ – China, the US and the battle to control the future…
Donald Trump is planning ethnic cleansing in Gaza
This imperialistic “Riviera” project could have been dreamt up by the Israeli far right.By Rajan Menon
The Do No Harm dilemma
What happens when a drug that can save lives could also ruin them? By Hannah Barnes
Class war: the battle over private schools
Labour must recover its radical tradition and close Britain’s education privilege gap.By David Kynaston and Francis Green
Essay: ‘Russia’s Costly Conquest In Ukraine’
FOREIGN AFFAIRS MAGAZINE (February 5, 2025): Today, about 20 percent of southeastern Ukraine is under Russian occupation, including Crimea and large parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions. Russian President Vladimir Putin has painted the war in Ukraine as a nationalist campaign to repel Western advances and reclaim territory that, in his view, rightfully belongs to Russia. But conquest has another motivation: economic gain. If Russia maintains military control over these regions, it may be hoping to reap that benefit. At this stage, however, it is hardly clear that they would become economic assets for Moscow; supporting the war-torn territories could just as easily become a drain on its coffers.
The human costs of this war are enormous. Russian forces are ruling occupied Ukraine with an iron fist, engaging in a ruthless campaign of torture, kidnapping, violence, and arbitrary killing. Any assessment of the war’s economic consequences should not minimize its awful depravity or the immense suffering it has inflicted. But its economic outcome will affect future judgments of Putin’s decision to invade in February 2022. If Russia benefits economically from the occupation of Ukraine, the war may be remembered as a strategic success, albeit a coldblooded one. If Russia instead suffers economically, the invasion will be seen as a self-defeating, barbaric blunder.
The New York Times Magazine – Feb. 2, 2025
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (February 1, 2025): The 2.2.25 Issue features Charles Homans on Trump supporters’ wishes for his return to power; James Forman Jr. on the emptying on America’s youth prisons; C.J. Chivers on invasive crabs in New England; and more.
What Trump’s Supporters Want for the Future of America
Scenes from a return to power in Washington.
Invasive Crabs Have Taken Over New England. One Solution? Eat Them.
America’s Northeastern coast has been overrun by crabs from Europe and Asia. Luckily, they’re delicious.
‘The Return of the King’: Trump Embraces Trappings of the Throne
Restored to power, President Trump claimed that God put him there and asserted the right to single-handedly redraw the world map as he sees fit.
Literary Review Magazine – February 2025 Preview
LITERARY REVIEW (February 1, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Sebald’s Critical Eye’…
A Quiet Evening
The Travels of Norman Lewis by John Hatt (ed) – review by Nicholas Rankin
Hitler’s Royal Welcome
The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration By Stephan Malinowski (Translated from German by Jefferson Chase)
Number-Cruncher of Nineveh
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History By Selena Wisnom
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History By Moudhy Al-Rashid
Boomers Daily 