Review
Shakespeare as life coach
Surely every serious reader agrees with Hamlet, that Shakespeare’s plays hold “a mirror up to nature”, thus revealing “the very age and body” of us and our times. Although Fintan…
Eyes on India
The Shortest History of India, by John Zubrzycki. (Black Inc, 2022)Australia’s Pivot to India, by Andrew Charlton (Black Inc, 2023)With their compact coverage of broad subjects,…
How to broaden the political gene pool
Book review: But What Can I Do? By Alastair Campbell (Penguin, 2024)Alastair Campbell’s new book is a bestseller across Britain not just because he writes well but also because…
The forgotten weapon of mass destruction
Book Review: Death Dust: The Rise, Decline, and Future of Radiological Weapons Programs, By William C Potter, Sarah Bidgood, Samuel Meyer, and Hanna Notte (Stanford University…
Fibs, squibs, and trading digs
Book review: Why Politicians Lie About Trade … and What You Need to Know About It, by Dmitry Grozoubinski (Canbury Press, 2024)Trade policy tends to fly under the radar most of…
The economics of strategy
Book review: The Shortest History of Economics, by Andrew Leigh (Black Inc 2024)The final sentence of economist and politician Andrew Leigh’s new book, The Shortest History of…
The month the world changed
Book review: November 1942, by Peter Englund (Bodley Head, 2024)Early on in politics, Richard Nixon believed that knowing and understanding America – comprehensively and…
A bread index to measure revolt
Book review: The Revolutionary Temper, by Robert Darnton (Allen Lane, 2023)Who amongst us really predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the overthrow of Iran’s Shah, the explosion…
Noble Rushdie will not be silenced
Review: "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder", by Salman Rushdie (Penguin, 2024)Having already written an intriguing account of living under sentence of death (Joseph…
The God in the rubble
Book review: Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942–2022, by Frank Trentmann (Allen Lane, 2023)
On the eve of the First World War, the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch…