Book reviews, literary essays, and cultural criticism for the New York Times, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, New Republic, Air Mail, Slate, Atlantic, New Yorker online and many more.
The Abortionist of Fifth Avenue
The New York Times • 28th February 2023
The notorious Madame Restell lived large and fearlessly in a century not so far, far away.
How World War I Crushed the American Left
The New Republic • 18th October 2022
There are few episodes in national history as blithely misunderstood as America’s participation in WWI
Alta Online • 8th September 2022
On the literary history of swimming pools, objects of menace and desire.
Josephine Baker, Agent Provocatrice
Air Mail • 9th July 2022
Josephine Baker’s life—her rise from the slums of St. Louis to stardom on the cabaret stages of Paris and worldwide renown as a singer, dancer, impresario, and civil-rights activist—would be extraordinary enough without the part she played as a secret agent during World War II.
The New Republic • 20th June 2022
Writing in the interwar gloom of the late 1930s, Cyril Connolly warned that “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” It was a catchy encapsulation of an idea with ancient roots, that “good art” calls for monastic devotion.
New_ Public • 14th June 2022
On trusting an infant tracker app during lockdown.
‘The Case of the Married Woman’: After a Scandal, She Fought Back
Wall Street Journal • 28th April 2022
When an Englishwoman of Caroline’s era married, she ceased to exist, legally. Her husband took possession of everything she had: her body, her money, her children. In return, he would protect her and provide for her. But what if he reneged on the deal?
The complicated story of love, a governing illusion
The Times Literary Supplement • 5th April 2022
Is love a feeling, or a story? In this broad, breezy history of (perhaps) our most complicated emotion, the medieval historian Barbara Rosenwein sets out to classify love as a series of five dominant fantasies.
Today We’d Call Her a Progressive Heroine. She’d Have Hated It.
The New York Times Book Review • 29th March 2022
Over the course of the book, the mystery of Leslie’s birth pales in the face of a still greater riddle, which intensifies with every depression, recession, panic, crash, bankruptcy, lawsuit and family ruination: how anybody got the idea that capitalism works, and that men should be in charge of it.
The Siblings Who Became America’s First Women Doctors
The New York Times Book Review • 22nd January 2021
In hospitals for the poor, surgeons in blood-caked aprons went from handling corpses to delivering babies without washing their hands. What kind of woman would fight to join their ranks?
How Reading About Self-help Can Change Your Life
The Times Literary Supplement • 11th December 2020
Physical and virtual bookshop shelves groan with guides to self-improvement and self-care, which promise to show readers how to be healthier, happier, richer, tidier, smarter, more successful and less racist. But even as the genre metastasizes, it remains stubbornly invisible to the literary establishment.
JOANNA SCUTTS 