‘Women’s historical fiction’ is, in one sense, like pornography — you know it when you see it. The glossy covers featuring stylish stand-ins for the spunky heroines, often coupled with an airbrushed skyline of the city in which the story takes place, are prominent features on bookstore shelves and bestseller lists, the stories within these covers beloved by book clubs big and small. Agents and editors are hungry — starving — for it, especially if it sports some ‘literary’ flair... [read more]
Toby Manning, Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Can music change the world? Is it possible to recover elements of a liberated consciousness, one that might lead to emancipatory social praxis, from a cultural repository as deeply enmeshed in capitalism as the pop industry? These are questions that haunted much of leftist aesthetics in the postwar era. Refusing the mainstream procedures of classical harmony, as the Second Vienna School did, had done nothing to inspire a revolutionary awakening in the era of the Great War, but where music was... [read more]
I’m a dentist. I prefer to be a historian.
Historian, that’s me, by necessity pressed to dentistry.
— A tooth teller!
— The whole tooth!
— Nothing but!
Kevin Davey is a novelist of extraordinary range, ambition, and uncommon literary courage. His work defies genre constraints, narrative expectations, and even reader comfort but, rather than alienating, this boldness makes his work feel vital, and a reminder that fiction can provoke, disturb, and illuminate. His novels don’t... [read more]
Xuanlin Tham, Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene
reviewed by Gabrielle Sicam
Not long ago, I rewatched the vampire horror Ganja & Hess (1974), as its influences stood plain to me while watching Sinners (2025). The film follows Hess, a black anthropologist who becomes a vampire, and the later conversion of his wife, Ganja. After Ganja is made a vampire, Hess invites a male acquaintance over to their house for her to seduce and feed on. The seduction itself reads into the moment of lapse, feels confirming of her change. The man undresses her, their bodies framed by... [read more]
Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
reviewed by Helena C. Aeberli
At first glance, the cover of Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age — a still life from the Dutch Golden Age set on a neutral backdrop, surrounded by critical analysis — bears a striking resemblance to John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It took me half the book to realise what the cover art was actually mimicking: the interface of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, the subject of Vara’s work and, in some senses, her co-author.
In Ways of Seeing, Berger wrote of... [read more]
Back in the 60s and 70s, the male novel was cool: male writers, on male things, for a male audience. But by 1991 Britain’s laureate of masculinity, Martin Amis, was lamenting in the London Review of Books that ‘maleness itself has become an embarrassment. Male consciousness, male pride, male rage — we don’t want to hear about it.’ That remained speciously true until this latest so-called crisis of masculinity, when a few quixotic hacks determined that what young men really need is the... [read more]
Josh Cohen, All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World
reviewed by Tymek Woodham
The way we experience anger today is no more evident than in the trenches of our hypermediated lives. On a train, a sign placidly informs me that verbally abusing staff members is inappropriate in civil society, and that I can report any transgression to the company using a QR code. On my smartphone, I flick to a news app where a politician is brought to tears by the online harassment they’ve received ‘simply’ for quibbling over potential misapplications of the word ‘genocide’. On an... [read more]
Peter Ackroyd, The English Soul: Faith of a Nation
reviewed by Archie Cornish
The Anglo-Saxon kings encountered Christianity at the turn of the seventh century. Over the following hundred years their kingdoms gradually ‘christianised’, and that process was linked to the coalescence of separate realms into a single nation. In the celebrated spoof history textbook 1066 And All That (1930), W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman condense these huge parallel shifts into a single, crisp sentence: ‘the country was now almost entirely inhabited by Saxons and was therefore renamed... [read more]
Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry
reviewed by Joshua Abbey
Critic Ryan Ruby has written a poem for poet-scholars, which is fitting. About 150 pages into Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry, he argues that most contemporary poetry is written by poets at universities for poets at universities. His story of poetry begins in the oral age of Homer and Hesiod when there was no distinction between poet and audience. As singer and sung-to are ‘cosensible’, there can be no questions of authorship, intention, or interpretation — the... [read more]
One of Alan Hollinghurst's favoured novelistic techniques is the casual introduction among his fictional dramatis personae of people from outside the realms of invention. Still the most daring incidence of this is the extended scene in The Line of Beauty (2004), set in the 1980s, in which the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher makes an appearance, taking a stately turn around the dancefloor with its central character, Nick Guest. It is a moment both chilling in its monstrosity, and studiedly... [read more]
