Peter Hoskin
Verified- Books and Culture Editor, Prospect Magazine
- Games Critic, Daily Mail
- None, Daily Mail, Prospect Magazine
- None, Irish Daily Mail
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Books & Culture Editor for @prospect_uk. Games critic (and occasional films and books) for @DailyMailUK
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Articles by Peter Hoskin
The thinking man’s experiment
The headphone in my left ear emits a beep at random intervals within a 60-minute timeframe. It’s an insistent noise, as though it’s forcing me to do something. And it is. As soon as I hear the beep, I have to press a button on the small black device at my waist to stop the sound and reset the clock—the next beep could come in one minute, in a full 59, or at any point in between. But, more importantly, I also have to jot down what I was thinking at the moment of the sonic intervention.
Bayesian networks as prognostic models in oncology: a systematic review and recommendations for clinical practice
Bayesian networks (BNs) are increasingly recognised as powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools for prognostication in oncology, offering key-advantages over traditional regression models. This review identifies and evaluates studies that develop and validate BNs as prognostic models in oncology. It highlights BN’s unique capacities, such as modelling causal relationships, handling missing data, adapting to new evidence and predicting multiple outcomes in one simultaneously.
The giant of German cinema
Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders: from the 1960s onwards, Germany produced countless top-tier filmmakers. The most towering figure, though, was undoubtedly Alexander Kluge, who died this March at the age of 94. Little known outside his own country—“I would love to be accepted by an audience on the other side of the Atlantic,” he told an American interviewer in 2012—he was not only a director, but a film theorist, educator, behind-the-scenes advocate. A philosopher, too.
Part Looney Tunes, part Raymond Chandler - Mouse: PI for hire is a lot of mice, with a lot of guns
Continue reading Peter Hoskin Mouse: PI For Hire ( PlayStation , Xbox, Switch, PC, £24.99) Verdict : Riotous rodents Rating: BLAM! Welcome to Mouseburg, kid, where the streets are violent, the politicians are mice, the cops are mice, and the dames... well, they're mice too. For this is the setting of Mouse: PI For Hire, a cartoon world of talking animals that's part Raymond Chandler, part Looney Tunes.
What the world needs now is more Pokemon. Fall under the spell of Pokopia, says our games critic
Peter Hoskin Pokémon Pokopia ( Nintendo Switch 2, £58.99) Verdict : Creature comforts Rating: Unlike my five-year-old son, I am not obsessed with Pokémon. So the prospect of a Pokémon-themed game in the spirit of Minecraft or Animal Crossing, in which you tend to a little landscape and build a little community, left me cold. But then I actually played Pokopia – and was flooded with warmth. This isn't just my new favourite Pokémon game, it's also the best game I've played since...
Stop, thief! In Styx: Blades of Greed a light-fingered goblin on a crime spree is thwarted by...bugs
Styx: Blades Of Greed ( PlayStation , Xbox, PC, £34.99) Verdict : Bugs beat goblin Rating: Don't tell my mum, but I've always wanted to be a thief. Or at least I've wanted to be a thief ever since I first played, er, Thief in 1998. This was a serious game of sneaking around, of casing joints, of avoiding guards and, eventually, of stealing stuff. And it was glorious. I mention this because, since the series began in 2014, the Styx games have scratched my itching need for thievery.
With Mario Tennis Fever's special rackets your service return can be scorching... literally.
Peter Hoskin Mario Tennis Fever ( Nintendo Switch 2, £58.99) Verdict : Feeling hot Rating: A squat plumber isn't necessarily well suited to tennis — but Mario keeps on trying, bless him. Mario Tennis Fever is, depending on how you count such things, the eighth or ninth mainline release since the series began in 2000. Which begs the question: what's new? And, thankfully, there is an answer.
Fascinating but flawed book explores how sickness shapes our lives
Health workers by a triage tent for people suspected of having covidâ19 in Lisbon, Portugal, in April 2020 The Great Shadow Susan Wise Bauer, St. Martin’s Press It may be perverse to say it, but this is a fine time to publish a book about the history of sickness. We are currently spluttering through a particularly virulent winter in the northern hemisphere. And, of course, we all remember the even worse winter of 2020-21, when we locked our doors against the covid-19 pandemic.
Swinging the axe
I’d been told before interviewing Park Chan-wook that, although he speaks good English, he prefers to use a translator—because he wants to make sure that his answers are “precise”. After speaking to him, I can confirm: “precise” really is the word. Precise in his responses. Precise in the fold of the blazer across his lap. Precise in the arrangement of glasses on the hotel table between us. This precision is unlikely to surprise anyone who has seen Park’s work.
C Thi Nguyen: All a game
C Thi Nguyen is a gamer. Many people are gamers—artists, technologists, business leaders, even certain journalists—but many others still hold their noses at the term, as though there’s something overwhelmingly noxious about the biggest and, at times, most exciting form of entertainment on the planet. So let us use Nguyen to prove a point. Firstly, with his very person. Nguyen also happens to be an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
Video Games of the Year: 2025
You, the great-nephew of the late Herbert S Sinclair, stand to inherit a 45-room mansion. Except there’s a catch: you’ve got to find the hidden 46th room to come into your new property. What follows is a game of laying out randomised tiles to make a floorplan, solving puzzles in each new room, taking a certain number of steps each day, before starting over the next—all to learn the secrets of this weird place. If that makes Blue Prince sound like a board game, then rightly so.
Struggling to find gifts for the gamer in your life? Our critic has got a little list for you.
Peter Hoskin It's amazing what Santa and his elves can pull off in their workshop. Like this handheld gaming PC that's revolutionised my year in gaming. It's not as easy to use as some of its competitors, such as the Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch 2, but the Rog Xbox Ally X (£799) is extraordinarily powerful for a portable device — and extraordinarily portable for a powerful one. Sure, the price tag packs a punch, too.
Prospect’s Books of the Year 2025
Politics & reportage From this vantage point at the end of 2025, it is scarcely believable that Keir Starmer’s Labour waltzed into government just last year with a parliamentary majority of 174. But it really did happen; there’s proof—including Get In, the definitive account of Labour’s reinvention under Starmer, by the Times journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. Except, after reading, you may come to believe that “under Starmer” is a bit of a stretch.
The limits of Superman
The dumbest controversy of 2025—and it is a hotly contested category—came after some remarks the film director James Gunn made about his new Superman movie. “Superman is the story of America,” he told the Sunday Times in July. “An immigrant that came from other places and populated the country…” If you can look past Gunn’s slightly awkward spoken grammar, you’ll spot at once the word that triggered what was to follow. The I-one. Immigrant.
The Lonesome Guild is a game where you make progress by making friends
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Duty calls, but when it comes to the new Black Ops 7 game, you might be better off not answering
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How the nuclear age bombed
Writing about nuclear war is difficult because it is easy. J Robert Oppenheimer himself, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, set the tone with his paraphrasing of the Bhagavad Gita after the Trinity Test in July 1945: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Many others have followed with similarly poetic, portentous, awestruck words. So it is that mushroom clouds have a “terrible beauty” to them. Bombs fall with “merciless precision”. People yield to the “power of the universe”.
Age Of Imprisonment pits a princess against monsters. Bring it on.
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The vanished glamour of New York nightlife
Night People: How to be a DJ in ‘90s New York Century, pp.256, 25 Mark Ronson has one of the finest heads of hair in all showbusiness. The music producer’s coiffure is a dark, whipped and quiffed thing that makes it look as though he naturally belongs on a Vespa in Capri, being ogled by the belle ragazze as he scoots on by.
A Prussian soap opera
Earlier this year, I sat next to the regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge for a literary dinner—and ignored him for most of the evening. I had my reasons, and I still think they were good ones. Because, you see, at my other shoulder was someone heavily involved with the production of the world’s longest-running soap opera—and a bulwark of my life—BBC Radio 4’s The Archers.
Trouble in Königsberg
A Scandal in Königsberg, Christopher Clark, Allen Lane, £22 Königsberg is at once an extraordinary and quite typical place. Immanuel Kant was born in this Baltic port city, situated in what was the province of East Prussia, and remained moored to it for the rest of his life. Napoleon captured it in 1807 – ‘Königsberg is mine’, he wrote to Joséphine – and made it a staging-post for his disastrous invasion of Russia.
The original Hollow Knight was a marvel. Its sequel, Silksong, is a masterpiece, says Peter Hoskin
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Lea Ypi goes in search of lost dignity
The past is always present. This is true for all of us, but it seems to be pressingly, possessingly true for the political philosopher Lea Ypi. She wrote about both her own and Albania’s past in Free, the 2021 book that turned this professor at the London School of Economics (LSE) into a literary star in the UK but was altogether more contentious in her home country.
The day we learned how to end the world
Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age, Frank Close, Allen Lane, £25 There are few, if any, more significant before and after moments in history than 7.15 pm GMT on 31 October 1952. Before that time, humans could destroy and be destroyed by each other – by club, by spear, by gun, by bomb. After that time, we had achieved an entirely higher order of destructiveness – with a weapon that could kill not just humans but all humanity, along with every other organism on Earth.
The special centenary celebration of The Culture!
One thing I didn’t quite realise when we decided, a couple of years ago, to number each edition of The Culture newsletter is that it would make the 100th edition—this one—feel a little… different. You can’t just send out the usual newsletter when it’s got those three digits in its subject line. You’ve got to somehow mark the occasion. So mark it we shall.
Strangers and Intimates review: Are we killing off the idea of private life?
Strangers and Intimates Tiffany Jenkins (Picador (UK, available now; US, 15 July)) Whatever happened to good old-fashioned privacy? Nowadays, practically everything about us is known, traded and exploited by social media platforms, even when we aren’t opening the curtains on our inner lives ourselves. Click. There’s the sourdough your smug uncle made this morning. Click. There’s your friend crying about a missed promotion. Click.
How video games wrote the future
Artificial intelligence used to mean something different. Or at least it did to me, back in the time of blocky, beige home computers and bold prognostications about the end of history—the 1990s. Video gaming was in its adolescence then but, unlike most teenagers, there was barely a trace of awkwardness or unease about it. The medium had moved out of computer labs and amusement arcades and into our homes, with consoles and PCs delivering increasingly sophisticated experiences.
Among the LA protesters
Things fray before they fall apart. I’ve been in downtown Los Angeles, the site of the protests against the government’s immigration raids, since last Thursday—and I’ve seen a whole lot of fraying. The streets here, in the biggest city in the fifth-richest state of the wealthiest country in the world, are awash with drugs and homelessness. The frontages of grand old buildings from the 1950s are boarded over. Tarpaulin shelters line most sidewalks. The overriding smell is of piss.
The Tree of Life review: Welcome to a great, straightforward guide to evolutionary relationships
The Tree of Life Max Telford (John Murray (UK) W. W. Norton (US, 11 November)) Most of us can imagine a tree of life; some can even sketch one out. Branches coming off branches coming off branches, each describing a turn in evolutionary history. Over here are the molluscs. Over there, the apes. Look closer in that general area and you might even find us, . But do any of us truly marvel at this giant tree, as…
An elegant account of how one ancient language went global
Proto Laura Spinney (HarperCollins (UK) Bloomsbury Publishing (US, 13 May)) A new book by Laura Spinney is rather tantalisingly called , begging the question: proto-what? Prototype, the earliest version of a technology? Protoplasm, the stuff of our cells? Or even protoplanet, a small hunk of space rock with a big future ahead? The answer, in fact, sits above and across those words: Proto-Indo-European.
“Ideologies injure our brains and bodies”-an interview with Leor Zmigrod
The Ideological Brain leads with an account of an experiment that is worth reiterating. It’s called the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and it shows its participants a selection of cards on a screen. All of the cards have coloured shapes on their faces. One might have, say, two blue squares. Another a single red triangle. It’s up to participants to figure out the rules of this test through trial and error. How do you match a single card at the bottom of the screen with the four differing cards above it?
Is this free speech?
What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea by Fara Dabhoiwala (Allen Lane, 480 pages, £30) Freedom of speech is never done with us, and we are never done with it. This is always true, but somehow it seems even more true at the moment. You need only log on to Elon Musk’s X to see how theories of free expression are tested every millisecond of every 21st-century day, often to breaking point.
What a piece of work: ‘Hamlet’ in ‘Grand Theft Auto’
Is this a gaming column? A film one? Or a theatre one? Normally, I’d keep such editorial ruminations to myself—but, in this case, they’re kind of the point. For Grand Theft Hamlet, which has just started streaming on Mubi, is a documentary about a staging of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy in the trigger-happy video game Grand Theft Auto V. It isn’t just genre-defying, it’s genre-slaying. Blam! Why would anyone do such a thing? The answer, as with so many other recent glorious madnesses, is Covid.
PETER HOSKIN: We're going on a Monster Hunt! Whether you're a grizzled pro or a weedy novice, you'll find something to love in Wilds - the latest instalment in the Japanese fantasy series | Express Digest
By PETER HOSKIN Published: 01:07 GMT, 28 February 2025 | Updated: 01:08 GMT, 28 February 2025 Monster Hunter: Wilds (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £59.99) Verdict: Monstrously good Rating: How mean a monster hunter are you? That, really, is the question on the release of Monster Hunter: Wilds, the latest entry in this 20-year-old Japanese series.
PETER HOSKIN reviews Sid Meier's Civilization VII: Civilization marches on - but sometimes, as in the case of Civ VII, 'progress' makes you pine for the past… | Express Digest
By PETER HOSKIN Published: 00:13 GMT, 14 February 2025 | Updated: 00:22 GMT, 14 February 2025 Sid Meier’s Civilization VII (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, £59.99) Verdict: Less civilised Rating: The launch of a new title in the 34-year-old Civilization series is always quite something. It’s an event. A monument on the landscape of gaming. But it’s also a kind of diminution.
The Promise of Radiotherapy in High-Risk Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer
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Shoot to thrill as a Second World War freedom fighter: PETER HOSKIN reviews Sniper Elite: Resistance
By PETER HOSKIN Published: 01:14 GMT, 31 January 2025 | Updated: 01:37 GMT, 31 January 2025 Sniper Elite: Resistance (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £44.99) Verdict: On target Rating: If you’ve ever wanted to blow up the guns of Navarone or bust some dams or plot a great escape, then here is the game for you. Sniper Elite: Resistance is a classic Second World War movie in playable form. Full of derring-do and dastardly Nazis.
A rich guide to the science of imagination also digs into art
The Shape of Things Unseen Adam Zeman (Bloomsbury Circus) Just imagine! No, seriously, just imagine: an apple, perhaps, or a cartful of apples, or even a kingdom in which monstrous apples are fought by oranges on horseback. Our imaginations are capable of this โ and much more. They are responsible for films, novels and paintings, as well as buildings, computers and governments. They are unfathomably powerful. And yet the imaginings themselves are gossamer โ hard to hold onto, hard to pin down.
PETER HOSKIN: You think the weather outside is frightful? Wait till you get to US Outpost #31, in Antarctica, where some Thing is running amok…
By PETER HOSKIN Published: 01:37 GMT, 6 December 2024 | Updated: 02:48 GMT, 6 December 2024 The Thing: Remastered (PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, £24.99) Verdict: Winter wonderland Rating: It’s winter. A great time for you and a few close friends to hunker down in a cosy location, safe from the freezing weather outside, and… descend into madness and paranoia as a parasitic monster from outer space tears through your number.
The world is quirky and colourful but isn't the usual sugar rush of ideas and imagination, writes PETER HOSKIN
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We ignore the real world-changing books
What do they say on LinkedIn? Some personal news? Whatever. I’m one of the judges for this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction—and I had the signal pleasure of revealing the shortlist of six books at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week. One of those six will now go on to win the final prize when it is announced on 19th November. You should, of course, go out and buy them from your local bookshop, or borrow them from your local library.
The comeback kid
When Donald Trump wrote—or should we say, put his name to?—his 1997 book The Art of the Comeback, he’d had quite some experience of its subject. Here was a self-proclaimed master of the deal who, by then, had taken business bankruptcies on four occasions, yet somehow always managed to crawl back into his golden elevator. Up, then down again. Down, then up again. Destined to struggle his way higher. The Apprentice. His own firing from that show.
Immune effects of α and β radionuclides in metastatic prostate cancer - Nature Reviews Urology
Abstract External beam radiotherapy is used for radical treatment of organ-confined prostate cancer and to treat lesions in metastatic disease whereas molecular radiotherapy with labelled prostate-specific membrane antigen ligands and radium-223 (223Ra) is indicated for metastatic prostate cancer and has demonstrated substantial improvements in symptom control and overall survival compared with standard-of-care treatment.
Deadpool & Wolverine review: Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman have the biggest laugh in this multiverse caper, writes BRIAN VINER
Deadpool & Wolverine (15, 127 mins) Verdict: Super smug While watching the new Marvel spectacular Deadpool & Wolverine, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman as the two title characters, it occurred to me that maybe there is a more expressive way of rating films than giving them stars. Instead, we could confer on them a number of emojis, those little symbols used in text messaging.
Boldly going where many, many games have gone before, writes PETER HOSKIN
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The First Descendant review: Boldly going where many, many games have gone before, writes PETER HOSKIN
By Peter Hoskin Published: 00:57 BST, 19 July 2024 | Updated: 00:59 BST, 19 July 2024 The First Descendant (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, free) Verdict: Not nearly the first of its kind Rating: An Earth-like planet has been invaded by a race of nondescript monsters led by a cackling space-authoritarian. It’s up to a band of superheroic humans, known as Descendants, to fight back using their guns and special powers. They go from mission to mission, mowing down waves of increasingly powerful enemies.
CRISPR–Cas9 potential for identifying novel therapeutic targets in muscle-invasive bladder cancer - Nature Reviews Urology
Abstract Gene editing technologies help identify the genetic perturbations driving tumour initiation, growth, metastasis and resistance to therapeutics. This wealth of information highlights tumour complexity and is driving cancer research towards precision medicine approaches based on an individual’s tumour genetics. Bladder cancer is the 11th most common cancer in the UK, with high rates of relapse and low survival rates in patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC).
Digital spatial profiling of the microenvironment of muscle invasive bladder cancer - Communications Biology
Abstract Muscle invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) is a molecularly diverse disease with varied clinical outcomes. Molecular studies typically employ bulk sequencing analysis, giving a transcriptomic snapshot of a section of the tumour. However, tumour tissues are not homogeneous, but are composed of distinct compartments such as the tumour and stroma.
Dose escalation of tolinapant (ASTX660) in combination with standard radical chemoradiotherapy in cervical cancer : a study protocol for a phase 1b TiTE-CRM clinical trial (CRAIN) in UK secondary care centres | BMC Cancer | Full Text
CRAIN is a phase Ib open-label, dose escalation trial of tolinapant in combination with cisplatin based CRT in women with cancer of the cervix. The CRAIN trial primary objective is to establish the maximum tolerated dose of tolinapant in combination with CRT and to determine a RP2D for a future phase II trial. The primary end point is dose limiting toxicities (DLTs).
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