Newsletter 2025

Well, it’s been another busy year – lots of things I had planned, but plenty of surprises along the way too. All in all, I’m pretty happy with how things have gone!

My personal highlight has been running the Writer’s Bookshelf feature on my Substack, the Broken Compass. I set the Writer’s Bookshelf up back in January and it’s now in its forty-sixth edition, appearing every Monday (almost!) through the year. I’ve loved reading all the answers as much as everyone else has, and I’ve been bowled over by the generosity and enthusiasm of all my wonderful guests. The full list of them is here: it’s a fantastic cross-section of historians, novelists, poets, critics, and more.

Relatedly, I’ve had the great pleasure of running more in-depth interviews with some great writers: Helen Castor, Daisy Dunn, Anne Stebba, Nicola Tallis, Laura Thompson and Edward Wilson-Lee.

As to my own writing, my favourite essays are probably those on the profound medieval mysteries of Nottingham alabaster and on Louis MacNeice’s pre-war masterpiece, Autumn Journal.

But I was also very pleased with how my piece on Philip Gröning’s extraordinary film Into Great Silence ended up.

And I was delighted to get the opportunity to write about Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks for the fiftieth anniversary of its release and to mark the passing of the incomparable Tom Lehrer for Engelsberg Ideas.

I have written another twenty-four pieces for History Today’s Months Past feature this year. (I think I’ve written one hundred and forty in total now. Yikes.) My favourites this time round were those on the test flight of the Spitfire and the discovery of microscopic life by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. I’ve thought of a way to post these regularly on the Broken Compass, so I’ll start running them here next year.

I’ve also had reviews and other work published by Engelsberg Ideas, Literary Review, Slightly Foxed, the Spectator, Spectator World, and the Telegraph.

First off, two absolute favourites.

Richard Holmes’s The Boundless Deep explored how revolutionary scientific discoveries about deep space and deep time profoundly influenced the psychology, faith and poetry of the young Alfred Tennyson.

Elizabeth Goldring’s magisterial scholarly biography of the peerless Hans Holbein will surely prove the definitive account of its subject for decades to come.

But it was a privilege to review lots of other great books too.

Christopher Clark’s A Scandal in Königsberg, a profound and ultimately rather moving study of a forgotten moral and political crisis, which also has some thoughtful contemporary resonances.

Mexico: A 500-Year History by Paul Gillingham, a brilliantly executed political history of one of the world’s most extraordinary nations, which captures so much of the country’s cultural richness and complexity.

Andrew Jotischky’s The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History, a yet more epic survey of monasticism’s influence on Christian life in both East and West.

I greatly admired Helen Carr’s Sceptred Isle, her vivid and eloquent new history of England (and therefore also a fair chunk of France) in the extraordinary tumult of the fourteenth century.

The Grammar of Angels by Edward Wilson-Lee is another superb book from one of the most interesting and gifted historians currently writing. It uses the life and thought of the Renaissance mystic Pico della Mirandolla to explore the limits of language and the experience of the sublime. You won’t read anything else like it.

The Great Siege of Malta by Marcus Bull was a deft and nuanced new account of a rare, epic and somewhat-fabled Christian victory against the Ottoman Empire.

I thought Selena Wisnom’s The Library of Ancient Wisdom was wonderful: a revelatory account of Mesopotamian life and culture in the Bronze Age.

In The Sound of Utopia, Michel Krielaars chillingly examined the plight of performers, musicians and composers under Stalin through the lives of ten very different individuals.

The Two Hundred Years War by Michael Livingston. Despite a flawed central conceit, I thought this was a remarkably pacy and tightly woven one-volume history of the Hundred Years War. The battles, and wider military activities, in particular, were superbly handled.

And then there were three disappointments. None of them were bad books. Perhaps I just hoped too much of them.

The Medieval Moon by Ayoush Lazikani, a survey of how medieval people around the world thought about the moon, and otherwise used it to think about life and experience. A great idea let down somewhat by the execution, I thought.

Marina Warner’s Sanctuary is an attempt to find a modern secular form for an ancient privilege, with contemporary debates about migration in mind. It’s a baggy, discursive book with lots of interesting material but I thought the conclusions lacked substance.

Ian Leslie’s John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. I’m a great admirer of Leslie’s writing and the long piece he wrote about the Beatles on his Substack a few years ago, out of which this book grew, was outstanding. There were some great passages in this. I felt too much of it went over very familiar ground, though. (Everyone else seems to like it, so what do I know?)

I also had the pleasure of reviewing two exhibitions: Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection at the Courtauld Gallery and The Secrets of the Thames at London Museum Docklands. These are such a joy to write and I’m sorry I couldn’t do more this year.

Back here on Substack, I’ve really enjoyed running previews – like this one, most recently – of what I think will be the best history and non-fiction books each month. I’ve covered well over a hundred titles this year.

And I’ve also loved writing the ‘Going, Going, Gone…’ feature, which is my pick of the best – or at least my favourite – works going under the hammer at the big London auction houses.

Another regular feature that I’m pleased with is ‘First sight’, which looks at the contemporary reception of now-classic novels. So far, I’ve covered Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes – and I’m interrupting what will be a very deep dive into F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to write this newsletter.

Other one-off topics covered on Substack this year have included a long behind-the-scenes look at book reviewing; a tour of four surviving Anglo-Saxon churches; an eighteenth-century thieves lexicon; my father’s visit as a nineteen-year-old naval officer to Nagasaki in October 1945; and bird watching in the Normandy bocage. There have been lots of other pieces too, of course.

One of the things I really like about growing an audience on Substack is the chance to reintroduce older essays to new readers. In particular, I’ve loved being able to share again my pieces on Normandy 1944, on Joan Miró’s ‘Dog Barking at the Moon’, on Rudyard Kipling, on John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk, and on Elizabethan London, among others.

Elsewhere, I haven’t had the chance to write or submit much poetry this year, so I was doubly thrilled to have a poem, ‘Rites of spring’, in the autumn issue of Poetry London.

Finally, I enjoyed chatting about Englishness and humour on the Engelsberg Ideas podcast back in the spring. And if it was good to being able to vent my frustrations about the ongoing crisis at the British Library to the Daily Telegraph, it was great to be quoted on Veedon Fleece in Andrew Male’s run-down of the top-ten Van Morrison albums in Mojo.

The Broken Compass will have its shutters down from 23 December until the New Year, so after The Writer’s Bookshelf on Monday, there won’t be another post until the next edition of that on 5 January.

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas and all love, luck, health and happiness in the New Year!

Mathew x

PS There’s an end-of-year half-price sale on at the Broken Compass, so now would be an excellent time to upgrade to a paid subscription, which gives you access to all of the above – plus every new post over the next twelve months! A bargain, surely?