reviews & essays

‘With Passion’, Art and Christianity (2023)
Review of a series of prints for Holy Week at St John the Evangelist, Newbury

‘Homeless in the World’, Los Angeles Review of Books (2023)
Review essay on Anna Seghers in English, especially Transit and The Dead Girls’ Class Trip

‘An unusually sharp eye’, The Tablet (2023)
Review of Janet Malcolm’s memoirs, Still Pictures

‘Discourse Analysis’, Times Literary Supplement (2023)
Review of the English translation of Navid Kermani’s speeches, Tomorrow is Here

Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics, Marina Abramović: Gates and Portals and Transgressive Devotion: Theology as Performance Art by Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, Art and Christianity (2022)
Review essay on performance art

Lost in translation’, Times Literary Supplement (2022)
Review of Duino Elegies, translated by Vita Sackville-West and Edward Sackville-West, and Rilke: The Last Inward Man by Lesley Chamberlain

Derek Jarman: Protest! and Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, Art and Christianity (2022)
Review of the two shows and of Pharmacopoeia, with a focus on Jarman’s interest in the saints

Invention and observation’, Art and Christianity (2021)
Review essay on Dürer (Albert and the Whale by Philip Hoare and looking ahead to the National Gallery exhibition)

On Campus’, The Tablet (2022)
Review of Either/Or by Elif Batuman

Derek Jarman: Protest! and Derek Jarman’s Modern NatureArt and Christianity (2022)
Review of the two shows with a focus on Jarman’s interest in the saints

Middlebrow Escapism’, The Tablet (2021)
Review of The Every by Dave Eggers

‘A political critique of desire’, The Tablet (2021)
Review of The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

Barbara Pym’s Obscurity’, Cambridge Humanities Review (2021)
Essay on privacy, other minds and the Church of England

The Human’s-Eye View‘, Oxonian Review (2020)
Review of Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

Jesse Darling and The Ballad of St JeromeBurlington Contemporary (2018)
Review of Darling’s show for Art Now at the Tate Britain

Becoming Plant, Oxonian Review (2018)
Review of an exhibition curated by Borbála Soós at Tenderpixel, with work by Victoria Adam, Julia Crabtree & William Evans, Ingela Ihrman, Paloma Proudfoot, André Romão

Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World, Oxonian Review (2018)
Review of the retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery – shortlisted in Burlington Contemporary Art Writing Prize

Awake awake, Oxonian Review (2018)
Review essay on folk music and Englishness (All in the Downs by Shirley Collins and Folk Song in England by Steve Roud)

‘Coming Home’, Oxonian Review (2018)
Review of The Explorer by Katharine Rundell

On Queer British Art, Oxonian Review (2018)
Review of Queer British Art at Tate Britain

slipping sideways into god’, Oxonian Review (2017)
Review of dom Sylvester Houédard: Typestracts at Richard Saltoun Gallery

At once intimate and immense’, Oxonian Review (2017)
Review of The Space Within: Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture by Robert McCarter

‘”He has what people call charm”: Gavin Maxwell’s otters’ , Cambridge Humanities Review (2016)
Essay on love and relating in Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water trilogy

I just take everything and I don’t know anything’, Oxonian Review (2016)
On queer knowledge in Carol (dir. Todd Haynes)

A Sense of Place’, Oxonian Review (2016)
On Oxford, a review of the little magazine IRIS

You’ll never get a result out of me’, Oxonian Review (2015)
Review of Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America & the UK ed. by Emily Critchley

‘The way lint collects’, Oxonian Review (2014)
Review of recent books on colour (On Being Blue, by William H. Gass,  Blue Mythologies by Carol Mavor, Green: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau, and The Culture of Yellow by Sabine Doran)