Between 2011 and 2022 I wrote eleven pieces for the much-missed Berfrois site. Most were reviews of recent books. Although the site closed to new submissions in 2022, I thought the archive would be preserved. I was therefore disappointed to discover recently that a link to one of my pieces was broken, and on checking I found that the whole archive has gone, though much is archived at the Wayback Machine.

I have now posted all my pieces onto Progressive Geographies as an archive of my work. It took a bit of work to find the original Word documents I sent to the site for some of these. The Foucault reviews were important in the process of working for what became my series of books on him; others relate to different publications on Kant and Shakespeare.

1. “Power, Nietzsche and the Greeks: Foucault’s Leçons sur la volonté de savoir”, 2011
2. “By Sovereignty of Nature: Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus”, 2012
3. “Kant’s Geographies” (on Immanuel Kant, Natural Science, ed. Eric Watkins), 2013
4. “Discipline, Punish, Examine and Produce: Foucault’s La société punitive“, 2014
5. “Confession, Flesh, Power and Truth” (on Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living and Wrong-Doing, Truth Telling), 2014
6. “Peasant Revolts, Germanic Law and the Medieval Inquiry” (on Michel Foucault, Théories et institutions pénales: Cours au Collège de France 1971-1972), 2015
7. “Foucault: His Last Decade”, 2016
8. “One or Two King Lears?”, (on Brian Vickers, The One King Lear), 2017
9. “Beyond the King’s Two Bodies”, (on Robert E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz), 2017
10. “A Classical Foucault” (on Paul Allen Miller, Foucault’s Seminars on Antiquity), 2022
11. “Editing Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna”, 2022

Aside from my own work, I’m struck by the ephemeral nature of digital-only material like this. In my own attempts to reconstruct the work of various theorists, and sometimes the histories of journals or publishing ventures, I’ve often sought out some fairly hard-to-find texts. But things in print, somewhere, usually turn up eventually – even if it can require a lot of leg-work between different libraries or patient inter-library loan staff. But this digital record, even quite recent, just seems to have gone. I’m not sure what is on the Wayback Machine is everything. Collectively we need to get better at preserving records like this…

For more pieces in a related vein, see my series of ‘Sunday Histories‘ – one posted every Sunday so far in 2025