Culture & History
I write regularly about cultural issues in the British press, including drawing on my work as a historian to provide context for contemporary debate.
I can be irrepressible when talking history: I recently enjoyed explaining the relative sexual virtues of Elizabeth I on Channel 5’s ‘Last Days of Mary Queen of Scots’, and leading a historians’ live-tweet of historical context for the BBC’s Wolf Hall. You’ll also find some of my book reviews, lighter pieces and broader arts writing on this page.
Handbagged, Vaudeville Theatre
discussed for The Spectator, 12 April 2014 Why do the Left love the Queen? Sure, most of us agree she’s done an excellent job in a difficult role, only screwing up a few major life decisions: tricksy choice of husband, wintry education of her children, fastidious attitude to peanuts. But as one of the...
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New literary award launches. But is the Folio Prize just a pretentious version of the Booker?
written for The Spectator, 11 March 2014 The British Library isn’t the first place I associate with contemporary fiction. For me, it’s about the Tudor manuscripts: the support and expertise of the manuscript room staff is second to none, and to the academic mind, few thrills compare to finding...
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The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Shakespeare’s Globe
reviewed for The Spectator, 27 February 2014 If Monty Python were working in 1607, they might have come up with something like Francis Beaumont’s raucous The Knight of the Burning Pestle. A parody of popular chivalric romances of the day, the play follows the adventures of Rafe, an oafish grocer’s...
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Ssssh! Can someone shut up the chattering oldies in the British Library?
written for The Telegraph, 13 February 2014 The oldsters in the Manuscripts Room are as bad as Mrs Richards I’m spending today – and most of the next month – in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library, poring over the clear italic handwriting of the first English writer to translate Euripides, the...
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‘A radical imagination’ – Doris Lessing in The Spectator
written for the “From Our Archives” section, at The Spectator, 18 November 2013 Doris Lessing’s obituaries, as much as her writings, bear witness to the great turbulences of the twentieth century. How many of us spent our childhood in two countries which have both since changed their names?...
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The memory of Kristallnacht should alert us to the perils of indifference
written for Conservative Home, 14 November 2013 When John Izbicki was an eight year-old boy in Berlin, he learned a lesson in divine justice. He decided that God exists because he watched an elderly woman, bent double with arthritis, split her head open on a sharp shard of broken glass. It’s an abhorrent...
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