Gulliver’s Warning
Like Gulliver in Lilliput, “greatness” in the political realm depends on the existence of a group deemed puny or weak.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – JUNE 25, 2026
Tag Archives: Book Reviews
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..
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – MAY 29, 2026 PREVIEW
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Is DNA destiny?’ – Matthew Cobb on engineering humanity.
Examining poets
J. H. Prynne and Geoffrey Hill’s clash over ‘hazards in rubric’ By Gabriel Rolfe
Metalheads and quilters
‘Aside from writing, what is your chief distraction, obsession or side-hustle?’ Writers at the Hay Festival reveal their private passions
The traitors
Cold War double agents, their lives and motives By Richard Davenport-Hines
‘I shall feel again, as soon as I dare’
Addictive anthologies of letters and diaries By Dinah Birch
The New Criterion ———- JUNE 2026 Preview
THE NEW CRITERION: The latest issue features ‘Political philosophy? by Harvey Mansfield; A dream of reason by Bartle Bull; The elephant in the room by Anthony Daniels; Kierkegaard & the age by Jacob Howland; New poems by Morri Creech, Kaily Dorfman, Matthew Stewart & John Poch….
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – MAY 15, 2026 PREVIEW
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Among Putin’s Russians’…
Anti-communist or antisemitic?
The ideology behind Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union By Richard J. Evans
‘Send on anything human’
Previously unseen letters between Ezra Pound and Gladys Hynes By Ed Vulliamy
You say lee-do …
The rise, fall and survival of open-air swimming pools By David Horspool
Main-character syndrome
Video games and political violence By Regina Rini
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
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – MAY 1, 2026 PREVIEW
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘A View of Her Own’….
Out of nothing
Tracey Emin’s self-fashioning By Sophie Oliver
Amateurs in name only
Women landscape painters reconsidered By Jenny Uglow
Bomb culture
Mankind has escaped nuclear war, for now By P. D. Smith
So close to the United States
Mexico’s challenge to received historical ideas By Benjamin T. Smith
Greedy for light
The bittersweet contentment of old age By Rory Waterman
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 Criterion ———- MAY 2026 Preview
THE NEW CRITERION: The latest issue features ‘ Western Decline’ by Victor Davis Hanson; Stoppard & Stopparianism by Jonathan Gaisman; The hector’s veto by Simon Heffer; The metaphysics of murder by Theodore Dalrypmple and New poems by Alfred Corn, Michael Homolka and Sunil Iyengar…
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