May 2023, review for Engelsberg Ideas of Magisteria

March 2023, review in The Telegraph of China and Russia

February 2023, Engelsberg Ideas, ‘When the Samurai Came to America

May 2022, The Telegraph, How the Oscar Wilde of Japan Tried to Stage a Military Coup

April 2022, The Telegraph, From Chinoiserie to Fu Manchu

April 2022, Engelsberg Ideas, ‘Mishima’s Search for Meaning in Postwar Japan’

April 2022, review in The Telegraph of The Avoidable War?

Spring 2022, Royal Academy Magazine, ‘Demon with a Brush

February 2022, review in The Telegraph of In the Camps & How I Survived a Chinese ‘Re-Education’ Camp

February 2022, Engelsberg Ideas, ‘Yosano Akiko – A Great of Modern Japanese Poetry

January 2022, The Telegraph, Jessica Kingdon’s Ascension

January 2022, review in The Telegraph of Kingdom of Characters

December 2021, review in The Telegraph of Pearl Harbor & Hitler’s Gamble

November 2021, review in The Telegraph of The Sisters Mao

October 2021, The Telegraph‘Cinema’s New Cold War’

October 2021, review in The Telegraph of Ai Weiwei’s memoir, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

July 2021: review in The Telegraph of The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives & China’s Leaders: From Mao to Now

February 2021: review in The Telegraph of Jonathan Clements’ The Emperor’s Feast

July 2021, BBC History Magazine, ‘Tokyo Olympics 1964’

December 2020: review in The Telegraph of Jonathan Kaufman’s Kings of Shanghai

May 2020: BBC History MagazineWhat is History’s Greatest Mystery?

May 2019: History Today, ‘Why Japan Stopped Fighting

April 2019: review in The Telegraph of Julia Lovell’s Maoism: A Global History

March 2019: review in The Guardian of Naoko Abe’s ‘Cherry’ Ingram

January 2019: The New York Times‘Marie Kondo and the Life-Changing Magic of Japanese Soft Power’

January 2019: review in The Telegraph of Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914 – 48

November 2018: The GuardianTop 10 Books about Japan

November 2018: BBC History MagazinePearl Harbor and Samurai ‘Mon’

October 2018: Essay on ghosts in Japanese culture, for The Telegraph‘s Saturday Review

September 2018: feature piece in The Telegraph, on Paul Fonoroff’s Chinese Movie Magazines

August 2018: Aeon Magazine, ‘Ghosts on the Shore

August 2018: review in The Telegraph of Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight

July 2018: review in The Spectator of Alex Kerr’s Another Kyoto

June 2018: BBC World Histories‘Japan’s Growing Pains’

January 2017: History Today, ‘Japan’s Charles Dickens’

October 2016: Aeon Magazine‘The Be All and End All’

July 2016: BBC News Magazine, ‘How Japan Came to Believe in Depression’

April 2016: review in The Telegraph of Frank Dikotter’s The Cultural Revolution

December 2015: review in The Telegraph of Kenzaburo Oe’s Death By Water

August 2015: BBC News Magazine, ‘Three Western Myths About Japan

December 2014: BBC History Magazine, ‘Real Lives of the Kamikaze’ [accompanying podcast here]

November 2014: Aeon Magazine, ‘Into Nothingness

November 2014: History Today,What Were the Wartime Japanese Thinking?

June 2014: review in The Telegraph of Ben Shepard’s Headhunters: the Search for a Science of the Mind

January 2014: Aeon Magazine, ‘Silent Communion: Is Christian Meditation a Contradiction?

November 2012: Aeon Magazine, ‘Couched in Kindness: Jakucho Setouchi and Japanese Psychoanalysis