LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – JUNE 25, 2026 PREVIEW
Tag Archives: Book Review
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – JUNE 25, 2026
Gulliver’s Warning
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak.
LITERARY REVIEW MAGAZINE – JUNE 2026 PREVIEW
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Peter Moore on George Forster * Anne Perkins on the Balfour family * William Whyte on British dons * Ian Thomson on the fall of the USSR * Joe Moshenska on Spinoza * Jeremy Treglown on Juan Carlos of Spain * D J Taylor on Henrietta Moraes * Howard Davies on recession * Martin Vander Weyer on Goldman Sachs * Piers Brendon on disinformation * Richard Vinen on Kissinger * Bettina Bildhauer on medieval health * John Mullan on Emily Brontë* Joseph Hone on Jonathan Swift * Duncan Fallowell on Lady Chatterley *
The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity
By Andrea Wulf
An exemplary tour of the High Enlightenment might go something like this. You’d begin in the streets of 1760s London to feel the pulse of Georgian commerce. You’d then hop aboard one of Captain Cook’s colliers and cruise through the Pacific, having encounters every day. Returning to Europe you might watch Benjamin Franklin in diplomatic action at Passy and dine with Casanova in Vienna, before sailing up the Rhine with Humboldt. Having inspected the Soho Manufactory in Birmingham and admired the picturesque scenery of the Peak District, you’d cross the Channel just in time for the grand and bloody finale in Paris.
Twilight of the Dons: British Intellectuals from World War II to Thatcherism
By Colin Kidd
Arriving as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1961, Terry Eagleton was both overawed and underwhelmed by his supervisor, a man he calls Greenway in his memoir. ‘Greenway was the first truly civilised man I had ever encountered,’ Eagleton recalls.
This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë
By Deborah Lutz
We know so little about Emily Brontë. There are just a few snapshots, like the vivid recollection of her sister Charlotte’s great friend Ellen Nussey: ‘Her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely loveable … one of her rare expressive looks was something to remember through life, there was such a depth of soul and feeling..
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – MAY 21, 2026 PREVIEW
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…
Lead Essays & Politics
- “America’s Afghanistan Delusion” by Tom Stevenson: Stevenson examines the legacy of the War on Terror, arguing that the 2021 withdrawal from Kabul was viewed by the Western establishment as a “mistake” or “cautionary tale” rather than the “crime” he suggests it was. He traces the expansion of American power through “black sites” and military advisers across the globe.
- “Short Cuts: Labour’s Failure” by James Butler: Butler analyzes the results of the English local elections (held on May 7). He criticizes Keir Starmer’s leadership style as “all injunction and no argument” and explores why national revulsion toward the Labour Party overshadowed local government issues.
- “Where’s All the Cash?” by John Lanchester: A characteristically lucid investigation into modern economics, focusing on the circulation of physical currency and the shifting nature of wealth in a digital-first economy.
Literature & History
- “On Marlen Haushofer” by Becca Rothfeld: A deep dive into the work of the Austrian writer, specifically her 1963 masterpiece The Wall. Rothfeld explores Haushofer’s recurring themes of entrapment and isolation, noting the paradoxical “joy” found in her most barricaded characters.
- “Baltic Snake Cults” by Diarmaid MacCulloch: The eminent historian reviews the long survival of paganism and “serpent worship” in the Baltic regions, challenging the standard narrative of a monolithic Christian Europe during the Middle Ages.
- “Should We Punish?” by Thomas Nagel: The philosopher engages with the ethics of the penal system, weighing the traditional justifications for punishment against contemporary moral and legal theories.
Other Features
“The Clearance of Aoineadh Mòr, 1824” by Tarn MacArthur: A historical account of the Highland Clearances, specifically focusing on the displacement of communities in Scotland.
At the Movies: Michael Wood provides his regular column of film criticism, likely focusing on current European or art-house releases.
Poetry & Correspondence: The issue also contains poems and a robust letters section, which in this period has been heavily occupied by debates over the Arctic (following Laleh Khalili’s piece in the previous issue) and the fallout of the UK local elections.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – MAY 28, 2026
Whither the Nerd-Bully?
Bill Gates was the monopolistic father figure who Silicon Valley’s young founders rebelled against—and, in so rebelling, became.
Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates
Iran’s New Winter
The US-Israeli war against Iran, far from encouraging a popular uprising, has strengthened the regime’s grip and set back the cause of Iranian freedom indefinitely.
Don’t Call It Entertainment
In Everthing Is Now, J. Hoberman chronicles a radical avant-garde’s attempts to jostle New York City out of its postwar complacency and moral retrenchment.
Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by J. Hoberman
The Sage of Washington
Walter Lippmann was the most influential political commentator of his generation, but behind his preternatural confidence was a far more complicated and unsettled character.
Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography by Tom Arnold-Forster
LITERARY REVIEW MAGAZINE – MAY 2026 PREVIEW
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Ritchie Robertson on Weimar * Charles Darwent on Louise Bourgeois * John Guy on the Tudors * Kirsten Tambling on dogs in art * Piers Brendon on Churchill and the crown * Saul David on AI warfare * Simon Nixon on private equity predators * Nigel Andrew on outsider animals * Zoe Guttenplan on Beatrice Warde * Maren Meinhardt on women and music * Lucy Lethbridge on swimming * Diane Purkiss on being published * Anthony Pagden on the West * Michael Reid on Lula * Anthony Teasdale on Tory leaders * Anna Reid on Vera Gedroits * Wendy Holden on Elizabeth II * Harriet Rix on trees * Emma Smith on Shakespeare’s identity * Jane Yager on Herta Müller * Sheena Joughin on Siri Hustvedt * Adam Kucharski on evidence * Keith Miller on Douglas Stuart * Natalie Perman on Jem Calder * and much, much more…
Weimar Germany: Death of a Democracy By Victor Sebestyen
Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe By Katja Hoyer
The small town of Weimar is overladen with historical associations. Goethe spent more than fifty years there as an employee and friend of Duke (later Grand Duke) Karl August. After the last grand duke abdicated in November 1918, the National Assembly met in Weimar to draw up a new republican constitution for Germany. Other symbolically charged venues considered were Nuremberg (home of Dürer) and Bayreuth (because of Wagner), but it was Weimar that gave its name to the period of German history from …
Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois By Marie-Laure Bernadac (Translated from French by Lauren Elkin)
Having been named for her father, Louis, a mere dealer in antique tapestries, seemed insufficiently romantic to Louise Bourgeois, who was born on Christmas Day in 1911. She preferred the idea that her namesake was Louise Michel, ‘the red virgin of Montmartre’, an anarchist heroine of the Paris Commune. It wasn’t true, of course, but …
This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England By Nandini Das
A phrase like ‘fortress England’ seems to echo down the centuries, and turns up again in This Little World, Nandini Das’s new study of identity and belonging, cross-border migration, assimilation and estrangement in the period between 1500 and the restoration of Charles II. Das seeks to unmask the period’s most fundamental assumptions about English … read more
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – MAY 14, 2026
‘The Right Amount of Crazy’
In Trump’s strategy of feigning madness to get what he wants, there is no longer any border between pretense and actual irrationality. By Fintan O’Toole
Charlatans & Bores
The profile of the pedant has changed surprisingly across time periods and cultures, but what’s constant is that nobody wants to be called one.
On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S.Q. Visser
‘The Music of What Happens’
Seamus Heaney’s complete poems, following on editions of his letters, prose, and translations, confirm the extent of his achievement.
The Poems of Seamus Heaney edited by Rosie Lavan and Bernard O’Donoghue, with Matthew Hollis
Manet and Morisot: Game On
An important exhibition showcases a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of the two artists’ work and, by extension, modern art itself.
Manet and Morisot – an exhibition at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, March 29–July 5, 2026
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – APRIL 23, 2026
From the Rooftops of Tehran
We in Iran own our grief, mourning all by ourselves.
Living Through the Civil War
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
‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’
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
The Aging Class
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.
LITERARY REVIEW MAGAZINE – APRIL 2026 PREVIEW
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Piers Brendon on Jan Morris * Richard Norton-Taylor on the Cambridge Five * Jane O’Grady on Wittgenstein * Wendy Holden on royal fashion * Martin Vander Weyer on Patrick Radden Keefe * Jeremy Treglown on Shakespeare in translation….
Jan Morris: A Life By Sara Wheeler
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…
Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire By Antonia Senior
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 …
We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware By Anja Shortland
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 ..
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – APRIL 9, 2026
A Bitter Education
In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy.
Shenzhen Express
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
Who Built France?
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
A Man-Made Disaster
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
Boomers Daily 