Middlebrow Tudoriana
Peter Ackroyd's Tudors is a pedestrian chronicle of the fascinating age of Reformation
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Mazower’s New World Order
Reading Mark Mazower is like being lectured by the best left-wing lecturer you'll ever have: he is brilliant but tiresome
Seeing is Believing
The narrative of Will Gompertz's history of modern art faithfully follows the Serota tendency, claiming modern art always trumps that which it supplanted
What’s in a Name?
In Literary Names, Alastair Fowler describes the surprising ways authors have christened their characters
The Spy Who Tricked Me
Ian McEwan's new novel Sweet Tooth is a brilliant exercise in deception
Not for the Fastidious
Nicola Barker's The Yips is a mass-casualty train wreck. Pity her martyred readers
Eliot Agonistes: Letters to and from the editor
The latest volume of T.S. Eliot's letters provide agreeable shocks and reveals the travails of both his professional and love lives
Clutching at Straws and Tilting at Minarets
Two new books on the origins of Islam suffer from, at best, sloppy, and at worst, dishonest, scholarship
A Long Way From Cable Street
Robert Wistrich's new study of anti-Semitism brilliantly elucidates how the Left has betrayed the Israel for which it once campaigned
Elizabethan Enigma
Edmund Spenser: A Life by Andrew Hadfield is vivid in parts, but ultimately fails to paint a clear picture of the 16th century poet
The Admirable Criterion
A new collection of Roger Kimball's literary and cultural criticism places him in the exalted company of Augustine Birrell and Walter Bagehot
Pandora’s Books
Belinda Jack's The Woman Reader charts the fascinating history of female literacy from Sappho to illegal book clubs in modern-day Iran