Books

To critique the critic

Harold Rosenberg’s mixed legacy counterbalanced both Communism and formalism

Could the US be heading towards civil war?

A crash course on the causes of modern civil wars

Too woke to travel write?

Perhaps a little less introspection will see a renaissance of the troubled genre

Move over Nigella, Nigel and Nadiya

The cookbook of the year was written by an elderly rogue and self-published

Between Middle Earth and the West

130 years from his birth, what can we learn from Tolkien?

A glorious flowering of difficult ideas

Two newly translated books evoke chapters of the divided and discarded history of Germany’s capital

Dante, 700 years on

We, too, are exiled from Florence

Hard times on the Black Dragon River

Thubron shows an unyielding willingness to listen to those he meets and attempt to understand their worlds

Murders for late December

Not all is grim and gloom in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series

The story of the people, by the people

What is History, Now? offers a passionate defence of the pluralism of historical study