Times Literary Supplement • 16th February 2024 Review: 'I Give These Books' The turbulent history of Yale’s university library
Times Literary Supplement • 3rd November 2023 Review: 'Inscription' journal A journal dedicated to the fabric and display of writing
ArtReview • 28th June 2023 Titan and the Psychic Nightmare of the Deep Sea What do voyages into the unknowable depths of the ocean reveal about the human impulse to confront the horrors submerged within ourselves?
Times Literary Supplement • 9th June 2023 Review: 'Printing and Misprinting' The early blunders of the printing press
ArtReview • 26th April 2023 A Brief (And Fading) History of Literary Cohorts Lists have always grasped for importance, but it’s still hard to escape the sense that Granta’s once-mighty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ leaves a rapidly shrinking cultural footprint
Times Literary Supplement • 6th January 2023 Review: 'All the Knowledge in the World' The enduring appeal of the hard-copy encyclopedia
Times Literary Supplement • 10th November 2022 Podcast Interview On the TLS podcast, I discuss my review of Christopher de Hamel's 'Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club'
Times Literary Supplement • 8th November 2022 Review: 'The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club' A group biography of book collectors across time
The Telegraph • 24th August 2022 Inside the strange, paranoid world of John McAfee Was the software developer, now subject of a Netflix documentary, a gifted technologist or a snake-oil salesman – or both?
The Fence • 12th August 2022 The Ideas Man For a few months, I’ve been hearing from people - mostly young, bright graduates desperate for a job in the arts - who worked at the Institute of Art and Ideas.
Modern Language Review • 29th July 2022 Review: 'Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture' 'There is nothing simple about compassion', the late Lauren Berlant wrote, 'apart from the desire to be taken as simple'
Psyche • 29th June 2022 Trashy media and the brain Readerly feelings tell us less about immutable states of mind, and more about the relative status of different sorts of cultural product at different times
Times Literary Supplement • 28th April 2022 Podcast Interview On the TLS podcast, I discuss my review of Emma Smith's 'Portable Magic'
Times Literary Supplement • 28th April 2022 Review: 'Portable Magic' A bibliophile critic’s powerful ‘shelfie’-portrait
The Economist • 12th April 2022 Blanca Li is a choreographer unlike any other Her latest project brings dancers and visitors together via virtual reality
Times Literary Supplement • 5th November 2021 Review: 'The Library: A fragile history" A 3,000-year survey of libraries, and the personalities behind them
The Economist • 21st October 2021 A new play stages excerpts from the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry Legal transcripts are allowed to speak for themselves in a “verbatim” production
Times Literary Supplement • 10th September 2021 Review: 'Index, A History Of The' A history of the book index must, in part, be a history of mighty scholarly efforts
Times Literary Supplement • 21st May 2021 Review: 'Burning the Books' How books and archives are lost