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 Magazine, ‘What 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 Guardian, Top 10 Books about Japan
November 2018: BBC History Magazine, Pearl 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’