LITERARY REVIEW MAGAZINE – JULY 2026 PREVIEW
Tag Archives: Literary Review
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..
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
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 ..
LITERARY REVIEW ———- MARCH 2026 PREVIEW
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Richard Vinen on the General Strike * George Prochnik on Chaim Soutine * Michele Pridmore-Brown on the fertility industry * Peter Davidson on John Aubrey * Joan Smith on Gisèle Pelicot * Piers Brendon on Kathleen Harriman * Jonathan Keates on the Venetian Ghetto * Erik Linstrum on Asante gold * Zoe Guttenplan on road signs * Holly E J Black on illustration * Michael Burleigh on the Arctic * Frances Cairncross on corporate scandals * Andrew Seaton on wind power
Not Funny, Not Forgotten
The historian A J P Taylor was at Oxford during the general strike of 1926. After it, he later recalled, relations between the minority of undergraduates, such as himself, who had gone to help the strikers and those who had signed on as special constables or volunteer strike-breakers were cordial. Only those sensible men who had stuck to their books and essays were disdained. The whole episode seemed funny in a stereotypically English way – like a Punch cartoon brought to life.
Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art
Cash Cow: How the Maternal Body Became a Global Commodity – and the Hidden Costs for Women
John Aubrey at four hundred
LITERARY REVIEW —- FEBRUARY 2026
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features Norma Clarke on Charlie Chaplin’s London; Richard Bourke on revolution; Lucasta Miller on George Sand; Peter Davidson on Constable; Philippe Marlière on far-right France; Munro Price on the Marquis de Morès; Piers Brendon on Trotsky’s demise; Mark Glancy on Hitchcock’s scores
High-Builded Clouds – Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons By Susan Owens
Where Fry Met Laurie – The Cambridge Footlights: A Very British Comedy Institution By Robert Sellers
Partners in Suspense – Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores That Changed Cinema By Steven C Smith
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’.
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.
LITERARY REVIEW – OCTOBER 2025 ISSUE PREVIEW
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features….Read All About It; Goethe’s Grand Ideas; The Basquiat Boom; Ministers & Monarchs; Operation Baku…
Strong Constitution: ‘Power and the Palace: The Inside Story of the Monarchy and 10 Downing Street’ By Valentine Low
Blood, Rage & Terror: ‘The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s’ By Jason Burke
Stocks & Scares: ‘1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History’ By Andrew Ross Sorkin
LITERARY REVIEW – SEPTEMBER 2025
LITERARY REVIEW : The latest issue features ‘Mysteries of Marlowe’
Boomers Daily 