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’.