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Recent Reviews
Simon Kuper
Rave The Irish Times (IRE) An absorbing, affectionate, astutely observed, cliche-free study of contemporary France.
Raja Shehadeh
Rave The Irish Times (IRE) This is a tragedy within a tragedy, of a father and son who, despite their similarities, failed to understand one another, against the backdrop of dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Rave Irish Times (IRE) Abdul-Ahad has written an astonishing book. To read A Stranger in Your Own City is virtually to live through the past 40 wretched years of Iraq’s history ... His descriptions are vivid and humorous.
Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Rave Irish Times For once, the publisher’s hype is true. Blood and Oil really is a riveting page-turner, a descent into a nest of vipers, a chilling profile of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by his initials MBS.
William Drozdiak
Rave The Irish Times (IRE) Reading The Last President of Europe is like rewatching a Netflix series about the fluke election of an ambitious, dynamic young man to France’s highest office. We’ve seen the movie, but the plot was complicated ... Relying on unusual access to the Élysée and political circles in Washington, William Drozdiak, a veteran foreign correspondent and fellow at the Brookings Institute, lights up obscure corners with behind-the-scenes anecdotes and the wisdom of hindsight. He compensates for an occasionally dull narrative with faultless accuracy and documentation. His text is an indispensable reference book for the first half of Emmanuel Macron’s five-year term ... This reviewer found the chapter titled \'Dealing with the Donald\' most fascinating, though that may be more because of Donald Trump’s awfulness than Emmanuel Macron’s Sisyphean efforts to make the US president act like a reasonable, responsible leader.
William J. Burns
Rave The Irish Times (UK) [Burns\'] His beautifully written book, rich in pen portraits, anecdote and description, is also a meticulous record of three and a half decades of diplomatic history ... The patriotism, steady nerves and logic-defying optimism that characterised Burns’s career have not left him.
Christophe Guilluy, Trans. by Malcolm DeBevoise
Mixed The Irish Times Reading Christophe Guilluy’s Twilight of the Elites is like spending a day with the yellow vest (gilets jaunes) protesters who have turned France upside down since November 2018. There are moments when one feels one has understood something obvious but hitherto overlooked. And there are bouts of exasperation at the conspiratorial world view and sheer destructiveness of the movement for which Guilluy has been a cheerleader ... There is an ugly undertow to Guilluy’s message, echoed in the rhetoric of the gilets jaunes. It is rooted in class hatred and conspiracy theories ... Guilluy overestimates the culpability of a political class that failed to foresee the consequences of mechanisation and globalization ... As social science, it’s sloppy. But as an insight into the mindset of the gilets jaunes, it doesn’t get much better.