Category Archives: Books

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 20, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Will We Still Google It?’; Syntax of Slavery and Habsburg Legacies…

Will we still google it?

I’m starting to feel some pre-emptive nostalgia when I do a Google search. Yes, it’s true, search can sometimes take you to places you don’t want to go. But at least a ‘classical’ search engine like Google in the 2000s and 2010s took you outside itself, and perhaps implicitly prompted you to evaluate critically what you found there. by Donald MacKenzie

Syntax of Slavery

Slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was taken for granted until the growth of abolitionism in the later 18th century. Liverpool could hardly be an exception when the slave trade was so embedded in its economy.  By John Kerrigan

Habsburg Legacies

We still live in the long shadow of Habsburg disintegration. In addition to the lingering legacy of 19th-century state formations, European and global politics are shaken by continuing reverberations in states that have disappeared from Europe since 1990: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the GDR and, above all, the Soviet Union. By Holly Case

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – NOVEMBER 14, 2025

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Roy Foster on Seamus Heaney’s miraculous poems.

Blazing graft

Charting Seamus Heaney’s Wordsworthian journey By Roy Foster

What the public wants?

Writing novels by AI – and committee By Gordon Fraser

Books of the Year 2025

Our contributors choose their favourites

Touching the void

Simone Weil’s ethical life class By A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone

LITERARY REVIEW – NOVEMBER 2025

LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Jeremy Noel-Tod on Seamus Heaney * Kathryn Murphy on Vermeer * Kirsten Tambling on two 18th-century artists * Sophie Oliver on Katherine Mansfield * Lucy Lethbridge on reading * Tom Shippey on the first king of England * Daniel Rey on Christopher Columbus * Nigel Jones on U-boats * Richard Vinen on the Second World War * John Phipps on John le Carré * Julian Baggini on effective altruism 

The Pen & the Spade

The Poems of Seamus Heaney By Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis (edd.)

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found By Andrew Graham-Dixon

A woman stands, oblivious to our gaze, absorbed entirely in her activity – reading, pouring, weighing, holding out her pearls. A window to the left admits a radiance, which falls variously on the common stuff the room contains. The light enters as an absolute blank, but infuses colour as it illuminates the scene. 

Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life By Gerri Kimber

The rush to tell the story of Katherine Mansfield’s short, fascinating life began as soon as she died. Her husband, John Middleton Murry, a gifted editor, notoriously turned the publication of her writing into an industry. 

The Hedgehog Review – Fall 2025 Preview

“The Character of Place” and “A Cultural Revolution on the Right”

THE HEDGEHOG REVIEW: The latest issue features ‘The Character of Place’ and ‘A Cultural Revolution on the Right’.

“The Character of Place” and “A Cultural Revolution on the Right”

Double Theme: “The Culture of Place” and “A Cultural Revolution on the Right”

Thematic: The Character of Place

Mourning and Melancholia in Las Vegas

A Tale of Two College Towns

My Charlottesville

Ethel Road Elementary

Made in Allentown

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – OCTOBER 31, 2025 PREVIEW

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Extinction rebellion’ – How Tennyson speaks to our fears.

Collision course

The troubled history of US-China relations By Katie Stallard

Playing a game to tell the truth

Iris Murdoch’s unseen poetry, transcribed for the first time By Miles Leeson

The Kraken wakes

Tennyson’s embrace of science and catastrophe theory By Angela Leighton

Winter is coming!

Tales of the uncanny from a master of ambiguity By Joyce Carol Oates

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 20, 2025

Table of Contents - November 20, 2025 | The New York Review of Books

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Fintan O’Toole on Kamala’s pointless campaign memoir, Jonathan Lethem on One Battle After Another, Anne Diebel on the trials of infertility, Colin B. Bailey on Watteau’s sad clowns, Linda Kinstler on the invention of sovereign states, Langdon Hammer on James Schuyler’s shimmering poetry, Samuel Stein on NIMBYs and YIMBYs, Miranda Seymour on Frankenstein’s mother, Adam Shatz on Alice Coltrane, a poem by Rae Armantrout, and much more.

The Lingering Delusion

107 Days by Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris’s memoir 107 Days succeeds at least in distilling the evasions and weaknesses of the modern Democratic Party.

Falling Off the Map

The Life and Death of States:  Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty by Natasha Wheatley

How States Die: Membership and Survival in the International System by Douglas Lemke

World War I set the stage a century ago for new ways of thinking about where states come from and what happens when they disappear.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS – AUTUMN 2025

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue of LARB Alien“, which wades into the unfamiliar. In Greta Rainbow’s “Tourists,” a woman travels to foggy Athens, where she confronts the unknowability of the city and her partner. In Sara Levine’s “Peter and the Women,” Peter (badly, ineptly, inappropriately, indecently) manages the women in his life: his hospice-bound mother and her nurse, as well as his girlfriends and one-night stands. And in Ari Braverman’s “Dogs of the Solar Steppe,” the narrator faces a decade-long punishment, performing domestic labor for a woman called Big Mother. Her former life assumes a “sheen of fantasy,” and the story warns us of “the easy slippage between one state and another.”

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 6, 2025

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jed Perl on critical thinking, Mark Lilla on the MAGA nation, Ben Lerner on his heart, Clare Bucknell on female critics in early modern England, Cora Currier on twenty-five years of the “war on terror,” Peter E. Gordon on the religion of sociology, Wyatt Mason on Guy Davenport, Josephine Quinn on St. Augustine of Africa, Geoffrey O’Brien on Kavalier and Clay at the Met, Nitin K. Ahuja on the science of death, Darryl Pinckney on James Baldwin, a painting by Maira Kalman, poems by April Bernard and Amit Majmudar, and much more.


Impassioned Ferocity

A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.

Authority by Andrea Long Chu

All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld

Those Passions: On Art and Politics by T.J. Clark

Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies by Jonathan Kramnick

No Judgment by Lauren Oyler

Storm Warnings

The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s by John Ganz

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K. Field

A Brief Literary Emancipation

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – OCTOBER 17, 2025 PREVIEW

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Artist in the making: Joyce Carol Oates on Sally Mann’s photographic craft’

Peer group

The British upper classes today By Michael Hall

Uniquely hers

A how-to book by ‘one of the greatest’ American photographers’ By Joyce Carol Oates

Master of the apocalypse

László Krasznahorkai, Nobel laureate in literature By George Szirtes

Thoroughly modern maenads

Religion, immigration, gender politics and severed heads By Mary Beard