Tag Archives: Book Reviews

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – DECEMBER 12, 2025

The TLS front page from the issue dated . Issue number

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘A Snail’s Tale – An unpublished story by Sylvia Townsend Warner…

Prince of the printed word

Tactful notes from a literary self-promoter By Nicola Shulman

Object of attention

Marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth By Devoney Looser

Wise fools

Irritating professors for the ages By Peter Thonemann

The Pursuit and the End

An unpublished story by Sylvia Townsend Warner, with a commentary by Peter Swaab By Sylvia Townsend Warner

THE PARIS REVIEW ———- WINTER 2025/2026

THE PARIS REVIEW : The latest issue features Art of Criticism, Art of Poetry, Prose, Poetry and Art…

Hélène Cixous on the Art of Criticism: “There’s a feminist discourse that women can’t do it all. This is what many women experience, and it’s very difficult. But I am not like that.”

Alice Oswald on the Art of Poetry: “You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poem has to exist.”

Prose by Eve Babitz, Marlene Morgan, Alec Niedenthal, Gwendoline Riley, and Elias Rodriques.

Poetry by Millicent Borges Accardi, Monzer Masri, Alice Oswald, Jana Prikryl, and Ed Roberson.

Art by Ali Banisadr, Pippa Garner, Joan Jonas, and Mieko Meguro; cover by Adebunmi Gbadebo.

LITERARY REVIEW – DECEMBER 2025

LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features  Peter Marshall on Holbein * Joanna Kavenna on Camus * Sophie Oliver on Margaret Atwood * Dorian Lynskey on George Orwell * Daisy Dunn on Clodia of Rome * David Andress on Jean-Paul Marat * John Foot on the Spanish Civil War * Jerry White on high-rise buildings * Edward Shawcross on Mexico * Daniel A Bell on the Chinese examination system * Anna Reid on Russian women * Charles Darwent on Barnett Newman * Robert Crawford on T S Eliot * Ian Sansom on William Golding * Mark Lawson on John Updike * Charles Shaar Murray on musicians * Patrick Porter on NATO * Thomas Morris on Renaissance diagrams * Diane Purkiss on palmistry *  Nigel Andrew on penguins * John Mullan on pedants * Molly Pepper Steemson on Anthony Bourdain * Mark Ford on Helen Vendler * Emma Smith on book

Holbein: Renaissance Master By Elizabeth Goldring

It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors, it is because we can all picture them so clearly. That, in turn, is due to an extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings produced between the late 1520s and early 1540s by Hans Holbein of Augsburg (c 1497–1543), many of which have become instantly recognisable. 

Doublethink & Doubt

Orwell: 2+2=5 By Raoul Peck (dir)

George Orwell: Life and Legacy By Robert Colls

Nobody under the age of seventy-five has heard George Orwell’s voice. The only extant video footage is in a silent movie of the Eton Wall Game. None of his many wartime recordings for the BBC Eastern Service has survived. By all accounts his voice, damaged by a bullet to the throat during the Spanish Civil War, was thin, flat and weak. In fact, the controller of the BBC Overseas Service complained that putting on ‘so wholly unsuitable a voice’ made the BBC appear ‘ignorant of the essential needs of the microphone and of the audience’. 

The New Criterion – December 2025 Preview

THE NEW CRITERION: The latest issue features

Art: a special section

My Grandma Moses by Jane Kallir

America beautiful by James Panero

Leiden lights by Karen Wilkin

Behind the scenes by Michele H. Bogart

The consonant Cushing by Alexandra Cushing Howard

A bull with his own china shop by Eric Gibson

Mittel march by Peter Pennoyer

The unsentimental builder by Michael J. Lewis

The mage of Torino by Philip Rylands

“Architecture unshackled” by Harry Adams

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.