The Critic Books Podcast: Nick Blackburn’s The Reactor
A compelling memoir about grief and repair
The North American Question
Was the American Republic destined to dominate the continent?
The Critic Books Podcast: C J Carey’s Widowland
C J Carey speaks to Francesca Peacock about Widowland
The Critic Books Podcast: Ariadne
Francesca Peacock speaks to Jennifer Saint about her novel Ariadne
The Critic Books Podcast: The Barn
The Barn is a history of the lives, landscapes, and lost ways of an old Yorkshire farm building
The Critic Books Podcast: George III
Graham Stewart and Andrew Roberts discuss the life and reign of Britain’s most misunderstood monarch
Is the myth of the “plucky Brit” false?
Professor Phillips O’Brien, Robert Hutton, and Graham Stewart discuss the British mindset during WWII
London gossip, Dickensian Christmasses and experimental castles
The Critic Narrated: Episode Seven, with Robert Thicknesse, Alexander Larman and Charles Saumarez Smith
The American Civil War – could the South have won?
Professor Jeremy Black discusses how the Confederate forces hoped to overcome the superior numbers and resources of the North
Merkel the Disaster
The sad dolts in the room are wrong about the former German chancellor
Which country?
Our rural landscape is much misunderstood
Is Cheltenham beyond parody?
A books bash these days has to offer Geri and Geoff Hurst and that bloke out of Radiohead
Draining the swamp
Residents are hopeful that the mayor’s grip on Venice might at last be easing
Not a dull phrase
Ethel Smyth: 2nd sonata &c (Delphian)
Fleeing Sally Rooney’s god
Why have critics been ignoring one of the novelist’s most important themes?
Don’t exploit Gisèle Pelicot’s story
Her legal triumph should be the start and not the end of the reckoning
Keir’s comms catastrophe
Labour’s goal is clear but its messaging is anything but
Soporific Starmer
The Prime Minister appears to be making a virtue of his own dullness
Heroes, villains and lessons in life
Intellectual history, sneered at in Oxford 40 years ago, is all the rage there now
Too many silences in this book about music
The hazy treatment of what “music” even entails falls flat
