
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – APRIL 23, 2026 PREVIEW



TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘The many faces of Shakespeare’….
China, America and the danger of war By Philip Zelikow
Discovering exactly what Shakespeare owned By Lucy Munro
Blake Morrison’s guide to life writing By Joyce Carol Oates
Writing about others as a means to write about yourself By Catherine Taylor

From the first day of his Presidency, Trump has posed an emergency to both his country and the world. By David Remnick
High-speed accidents, crooked lawyers, and poor people desperate for cash—it was the kind of scheme that could have been cooked up only in the Big Easy. By Patrick Radden Keefe
New scholarship reconsiders the apostle who turned a Jewish sect into a world religion—and whose legacy remains contested two millennia later.
By Adam Gopnik

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features ‘Christoph Niemann’s “New Horizons” – Technology and the future.
The two men might wish that they lived in a world where whoever dropped the most bombs got whatever he wanted. But the war has shown that this isn’t true. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Health and wellness influencers are hawking unapproved treatments on the gray market. The future of the F.D.A.—and the health of consumers—is at stake. By Dhruv Khullar
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.
By Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz

We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.
George Templeton Strong’s diaries provide the North’s best record of daily passions and woes during its struggle against the South.
George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries edited by Geoff Wisner
In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.
Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York City, January 28–May 24, 2026
Retirement, like so much of the American economy, is a broken system that benefits private interests and exploits the most vulnerable people.
Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age by James Chappel
Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy by Teresa Ghilarducci, with a foreword by E. J. Dionne Jr.

An argument for ‘British is best’
The argument of Peter Watson’s hugely ambitious The British Imagination: A history of ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II is that “The essential arc of British history – intellectual and creative history, just as much as political, economic and military history – is of a small, indeed tiny, country sequestered on the north-west coast of Europe that over the centuries would forge the largest and most unlikely empire the world has seen”. It may seem odd to be reading this in the present depressed state of the nation, although Watson stresses from the outset that the concept of “the British imagination” embraces its hospitality to foreign influences and eventually to the power of a wider “Anglosphere”.
The genesis of Far from the Madding Crowd
What smartphones can’t record
Modern English translations that do justice to the work

The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed…
It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt …
Not so long ago, stories about powerful computer viruses apparently spreading around the world and threatening to bring modern life to a halt regularly filled the news. These days, cybercrime rarely makes the headlines, and most of us have become inured to warnings that our passwords have been found in a data leak. Yet ..

APOLLO MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Exposed! – Italy’s First Photos”
The city has long been synonymous with finance, fashion and design, but it is increasingly banking on art too
The idea of the beautiful and the damned is a longstanding one, but a problematic one – in art as well as life
The city has been rebuilding the Residenzschloss, home of its one-time ruler Augustus the Strong, since the Second World War – and the results are worth the wait
The Shiraz grape is native to France, but it has longstanding links with Persian courtly life and culture

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Parallel Lives” – Around and under construction.
The present mess has roots in two entangled, defining White House projects: DOGE and the mind-bending expansion of ICE. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Restrictions and attacks in the Strait of Hormuz have made fuel prices rocket. Just ask the roadside tea venders in New Delhi. By Nathan Heller
A former C.I.A. officer says that he recruited scientists as part of the United States’ effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. By David D. Kirkpatrick

In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy.
In Shenzhen, the successes and failures of China’s remarkable new economy are on full display.
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company by Eva Dou
A new history explores France’s empire from the perspective of the indigenous and enslaved people who participated, willingly or not, in its creation.
By Flesh and Toil: How Sex, Race, and Labor Shaped the Early French Empire by Mélanie Lamotte
There has never been a moral and historical reckoning with the horrors inflicted by the Allied firebombing of Japan during World War II.
Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell