LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – APRIL 23, 2026 PREVIEW
Tag Archives: History
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – APRIL 17, 2026 PREVIEW
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘The many faces of Shakespeare’….
History lessons?
China, America and the danger of war By Philip Zelikow
A man of property
Discovering exactly what Shakespeare owned By Lucy Munro
Go deeper
Blake Morrison’s guide to life writing By Joyce Carol Oates
Out of sheer intention
Writing about others as a means to write about yourself By Catherine Taylor
THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – APRIL 10, 2026 PREVIEW
THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘Stress Test’ – Is Hungary on the brink of change?
An irony of Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power in Hungary is that his Fidesz movement was originally founded by pro-democracy, change-seeking young voters, even initially requiring members to be below the age of 35.
Now, in a crossroads election on 12 April, a new generation of Hungarians may be on the cusp of removing the rightwing populist prime minister, much to the dismay of his admirers in Moscow, Washington and Europe’s populist movements.
Orbán may have once described Hungary as “a petri dish for illiberalism” – as reflected by Harry Haysom’s cover art for us this week – but polls suggest his opponent Péter Magyar, a former top member of Fidesz who favours a closer relationship with the EU, could be the new change agent.
Spotlight | Was Trump conned by Netanyahu’s promise of an easy war?
Senior US officials now consider the Israel PM’s pitch to have been overblown, creating potentially far-reaching consequences for both countries, writes Peter Beaumont
Science | The 21st-century moon prospectors
Helium-3 is so rare that a palm-sized amount could be worth millions. As Artemis II flies by the moon and businesses look to the skies, is mining Earth’s satellite ethical? Oliver Holmes investigates
Feature | Can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped?
It costs the UK economy £700m ($920m) a year, and criminal gangs are operating with near impunity. Every time a lorry gets robbed, raided or hijacked, it’s Mike Dawber who investigates. By Stuart McGurk
Opinion | Ten years after Brexit, Trump is pushing Britain back towards the EU
It’s the silver lining from this terrible age of Donald Trump, argues Gaby Hinsliff: his disdain and insults are fuelling the belief that the UK should renew ties with Europe
Culture | James McAvoy, from a Glasgow council estate to Hollywood stardom
In his directorial debut, the X-Men actor is challenging stereotypes about his Scottish homeland via the remarkable tale of a real-life hip-hop hoax. Libby Brooks met him
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Preview: Archaeology Magazine – MAY/JUNE 2026
Archaeology Magazine: The latest issue features ‘Exploring the World of the Odyssey.
The Unexpected World of the Odyssey
Discovering the surprising inspirations behind Homer’s great tales of the Trojan War. By The Editors
Pioneers of Lakefront Living
Why Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers in the Alps built their villages on stilts
The Last Maya Kingdom
On the shores of a lake in Guatemala, the Itzá people defied the Spanish for nearly 200 years
Art for the Ages
A surreal style of painting endured for 4,000 years in the canyonlands of West Texas
Bridge to the Past
The Yellow River brought both prosperity and calamity to China’s dazzling medieval capital By Ling Xin
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – APRIL 23, 2026
From the Rooftops of Tehran
We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.
Living Through the Civil War
George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.
George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries edited by Geoff Wisner
‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’
In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York City, January 28–May 24, 2026
The Aging Class
Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.
Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel
Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy by Teresa Ghilarducci, with a foreword by E. J. Dionne Jr.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – APRIL 3, 2026 PREVIEW
Cultural superpower?
An argument for ‘British is best’
The argument of Peter Watson’s hugely ambitious The British Imagination: A history of ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II is that “The essential arc of British history – intellectual and creative history, just as much as political, economic and military history – is of a small, indeed tiny, country sequestered on the north-west coast of Europe that over the centuries would forge the largest and most unlikely empire the world has seen”. It may seem odd to be reading this in the present depressed state of the nation, although Watson stresses from the outset that the concept of “the British imagination” embraces its hospitality to foreign influences and eventually to the power of a wider “Anglosphere”.
English virtue battles the pagan
The genesis of Far from the Madding Crowd
The texture of etcetera
What smartphones can’t record
Freeing Thomas Mann
Modern English translations that do justice to the work
THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – APRIL 3, 2026 PREVIEW
In a landmark case, a California jury last week found social media companies Meta and YouTube liable for deliberately designing addictive products. The ruling came the day after Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was ordered to pay $375m after a jury in a separate trial in New Mexico found it misled consumers about the safety of its platforms.
Meta, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are facing thousands of similar lawsuits in US courts, while governments around the world are starting to introduce measures to curb social media’s grip on children’s attention.
Guardian technology editors Dan Milmo and Robert Booth assess whether what has been called a “big tobacco” moment for the industry will lead to significant change. And in our opinion section, Jonathan Freedland argues that the court verdicts must be just the start of a global fightback.
The big story | A war of regression
Weeks into a war that was going to take days and has cost billions, Donald Trump has bombed the US into a worse position with Iran, writes Patrick Wintour
Science | ‘On the shoulders of giants’
Plant specimens and teaching materials that inspired Charles Darwin have been unearthed and will be used for the first time to teach contemporary students about botany, Donna Ferguson reports
Feature | Circuit training
After touring 11 Chinese companies making humanoid robots, Chang Che asks: just how close are we to a robotic future?
Opinion | Labour needs a thinker
Ed Miliband’s stock is rising in a party in need of an old-style intellectual heavyweight, argues Gaby Hinsliff
Culture | Gimme shelter
Catherine Slessor visits Henry Moore’s former countryside home Hoglands, now home to studios and a vast sculpture garden, to learn about a new exhibition of the drawings he made as a war artist, capturing people as they took sanctuary from the blitz
LITERARY REVIEW MAGAZINE – APRIL 2026 PREVIEW
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Piers Brendon on Jan Morris * Richard Norton-Taylor on the Cambridge Five * Jane O’Grady on Wittgenstein * Wendy Holden on royal fashion * Martin Vander Weyer on Patrick Radden Keefe * Jeremy Treglown on Shakespeare in translation….
Jan Morris: A Life By Sara Wheeler
The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed…
Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire By Antonia Senior
It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt …
We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware By Anja Shortland
Not so long ago, stories about powerful computer viruses apparently spreading around the world and threatening to bring modern life to a halt regularly filled the news. These days, cybercrime rarely makes the headlines, and most of us have become inured to warnings that our passwords have been found in a data leak. Yet ..
APOLLO MAGAZINE ———- APRIL 2026 PREVIEW
APOLLO MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Exposed! – Italy’s First Photos”
How Milan is refashioning itself as a contemporary art hub
The city has long been synonymous with finance, fashion and design, but it is increasingly banking on art too
The dangers of playing the ‘beautiful’ game
The idea of the beautiful and the damned is a longstanding one, but a problematic one – in art as well as life
Restoring Dresden’s crowning glory
The city has been rebuilding the Residenzschloss, home of its one-time ruler Augustus the Strong, since the Second World War – and the results are worth the wait
Simply red: a short history of Shiraz
The Shiraz grape is native to France, but it has longstanding links with Persian courtly life and culture
THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – MARCH 27, 2026 PREVIEW
Brinkmanship, the ability to take countries to the edge of conflict, was a staple of cold war diplomacy. The remnants of that finely balanced standoff, bound by a rules-based order and spheres of influence, has given way to a world in freefall; to an ever-widening war in the Gulf where the aims are as unclear as the endpoint.
It is approaching a month since the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran, arguing they were acting to remove the country’s nuclear threat, destroy its ballistic missile capability and free the populace of a tyrannical theocratic regime. Yet it seems it is these civilians and neighbouring Gulf countries who are bearing the brunt of the campaign while the Iranian regime’s willingness to escalate the war seems undimmed.
Spotlight | The ‘anyone but’ election
Pippa Crerar looks ahead to local elections in the UK, where voters seem more concerned with who they want to keep out of political office than who they vote in
Science | Not-so silent nights
Can a “vacuum cleaner turned the other way” become a popular solution to snoring disorders? Natasha May explores the rise of Cpap machines
Feature | Gamifying government
Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture, Elon Musk’s Doge team set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people, write Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian
Opinion | Collateral damage
Attacks on synagogues and Jewish shops in the UK, Europe and the US don’t hurt Benjamin Netanyahu, says Jonathan Freedland, they just hurt ordinary Jews
Culture | Rock return
“Validation was an insatiable monster”: Dave Grohl talks to Ben Beaumont-Thomas about Foo Fighters, life after his infidelity and grief for bandmate Taylor Hawkins
Intellicurious 