Non-Academic Writing

I write regularly for non-academic publications including the Literary Review, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. Usually I write on the history of knowledge (from the ancient world to the present day), but I have also written on sport. If you are interested in commissioning a piece, please contact me.

‘The G Word’. Essay review of James Poskett, Horizons: A Global History of Science (2022), Literary Review (May 2022)

‘How Philology Changed the World’. Essay review of Christopher Celenza, The Italian Renaissance and the Origins of the Modern Humanities (2021), Literary Review (October 2021)

‘A Gleam in the Eye’. Essay review of Martin Kemp, Visions of Heaven: Dante and the Art of Divine Light (2021), Literary Review (May 2021)

‘Talk Like an Egyptian’. Essay review of Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz, The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English polymath and a French polyglot discovered the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs (2020), Times Literary Supplement (December 2020)

‘Masters of None?’. Essay review of Peter Burke’s The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo Da Vinci to Susan Sontag (2020), Literary Review (November 2020)

‘We Shall Fight them on the Terraces’. Essay review of Tobias Jones’s Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football (2020), Literary Review (May 2020)

‘The Mage of Reason’. Essay review of Michael Hunter’s The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment (2020), Literary Review (April 2020)

‘O ye of little faith’. Essay review of Alec Ryrie’s Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2020), Literary Review (February 2020)

‘Rambling on’. Essay review of Diogenes Laertius, Livres of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. Pamela Mensch (2018), Times Literary Supplement (April 2019)

‘Going for Gold’. Essay review of William Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2019), Literary Review (March 2019)

‘Misrepresentations’. Essay review of Alexander Bevilacqua’s Republic of Arabic Letters (2018) and Christopher De Bellaigue’s Islamic Enlightenment (2017), London Review of Books (November 2018)

‘Philosopher in Arms’. Essay review of Harold Cook’s The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War (2018), Literary Review (April 2018)

‘Strokes of Genius’. Essay review of Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci: TheBiography (2017), Literary Review (December 2017)

‘Deifying Gravity’. Essay review of Rob Iliffe’s Priest of Nature: the Religious Worlds of Isaac Newton (2017), Literary Review (September 2017)

‘Nailing the myth’. Essay review of Peter Marshall’s 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation (2017), Literary Review (August 2017)

‘Such matters as the soul’. Essay review of David Wootton’s The Invention of Science (2015), London Review of Books (September 2016)