Britain's best loved literary magazine, now in its 30th year
Reviews of new books in history, politics, travel, biography and fiction
Contributors who are irreverent, accomplished and amusing

"In Literary Review you find something that has almost vanished from the book pages: its contributors are actually interested in Literature."
Martin Amis

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Washington Post

Selected highlights from the September 2010 issue:

D J Taylor on why the British novel will never satisfy Gabriel Josipovici
OUR ISLAND STORIES
'It is not, as Josipovici insists, that the postwar English novel has been let down by its novelists: the real failure, it might be argued, has come from its critics, both sympathetic and hostile. The most conspicuous victim of this tendency to domesticate and sanitise has been Anthony Powell, too often written off as a supercilious observer of the upper-class drawing room, when what he really specialises in are profoundly oblique and decentred analyses of quiddity - the things that, in the last resort, make one human being different from another...' Read more.

Susan Greenfield on the Internet and Our Brains
ATTENTION, PLEASE
'Last year, adults in North America were apparently spending an average of twelve hours a week online, double the time devoted only four years previously. Perhaps more thought-provoking still is that this activity, which constituted some third of all leisure time, was not being subtracted from, but was additional to, other screen pastimes such as watching television...' Read more.

Jonathan Mirsky on Mao's Great Famine
'LIVELIHOOD ISSUES'
'In brutal fact, between 1959 and 1962, at least forty-three million Chinese died during the famine ... Most died of hunger, over two million were executed or were beaten or tortured to death, the birth rate halved in some places, parents sold their children, and people dug up the dead and ate them...' Read more.

Donald Rayfield on the Killing Fields of Eastern Europe
BLOODLANDS
'Bloodlands is as apt a title for a history of Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine under Stalin and Hitler as it is for one of modern Cambodia or Rwanda. Timothy Snyder focuses on the horrific mortality among civilians in the vast area between Germany and Russia: Ukrainian peasants in the collectivisation of 1929-33, Jews between 1941 and 1945, Poles between 1939 and 1945, and Belarusians from Stalin's 'Great Terror' in 1937 to the retreat of the Germans in 1944...' Read more.

Richard Davenport-Hines on Bruce Chatwin's Letters
A WRITER ABROAD
'Chatwin was that familiar English middle-class phenomenon, the social climber with a taste for lowlife. In his letters one encounters art dealers with princely manners but whorish ethics, a Duchess of Westminster, a Qantas air steward, a stag-hunting Tory grandee, a Brazilian barman, and a tough, moustachioed French ex-legionnaire who bores artesian wells in Niger, always accompanied in his Land Rover by eight spindly Hausa catamites ("when I need a white one, he says, there's always the Peace Corps")...' Read more.

Christopher Hart on London and its Vices
THE DRUNKEN MEMBER
'Catharine Arnold says that Paris is the city of love, but London the city of lust. This sounds a little sweeping, but contains some truth. Obviously Paris has done its fair share of lusting too, and London has had its true lovers, but she astutely notes our very Anglo-Saxon mix of 'ribaldry and reticence'. England is the land not of passionate lovemaking, but of the Donald McGill postcard and the rude limerick...' Read more.

Sarah A Smith on David Grossman's 'To the End of the Land'
CHILDREN OF WAR
'What story would a modern-day Scheherazade tell? For David Grossman, the answer is compelling: she tells the story of her fractured land, Israel, through the prism of her family...' Read more.

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