September 2024, Issue 533 Claire Harman on female detectives * Georgina Adam on art market scandal * John Keay on the Indosphere * Philip Womack on children’s books * Matthew Parris on the Queen * Thomas Shippey on Vikings * Robert Service on communism * Fiona Sampson on Auden * Miranda Seymour on Goethe * Stephen Smith on Gauguin * Danny Kelly on ageing rockstars * Kerry Brown on Xi Jinping * Roger Highfield on James Lovelock * Richard Davenport-Hines on Pamela Harriman * Henry Gee on fungi * David Anderson on the Spycatcher affair * Randy Boyagoda on Rachel Kushner * Morten Høi Jensen on Olga Tokarczuk * Mia Levitin on Garth Greenwell * Ella Fox-Martens on Stevie Davies * and much, much more…
The Current Issue
Claire Harman
The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
By Sara Lodge
‘If there is an occupation for which women are utterly unfitted, it is that of the detective,’ claimed the Manchester Weekly Times in 1888 – already behind the times, it seems, as women had been acting the part for years, albeit invisibly. They had started to feature in detective fiction too. It was studying the burgeoning market in ‘lady detective’ stories post-1860 that led Sara Lodge to wonder who the fantasy sleuths were modelled on, and why the Victorians found them so disturbing and alluring. What she has uncovered is a vast network of women in police work who stayed beneath the radar, off the books and virtually undocumented until now. Who knew about... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Georgina Adam
Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 1945–2000
By James Stourton
It is hard to think of a person more qualified to write this book. In addition to being an art historian, a prolific writer, a lecturer and a broadcaster, James Stourton is also a former chairman of Sotheby’s UK. He joined the auction house in 1979 and left in 2012 to become a senior fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. Throughout his long career in the art market, he has seen ... read more
John Keay
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
By William Dalrymple
After writing a string of award-winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken the glamour of the Mughals and the murky dealings of the English East India Company to look beyond the Indian subcontinent and make the case for the existence of a wider, pre-Islamic ‘Indosphere’. His aim in The Golden Road is, he says, ‘to highlight India’s... read more
Philip Womack
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
By Sam Leith
Children’s literature is a Snarky beast: hunt for it and you’ll find a Boojum. Texts written for adults, like J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, snuck into children’s hands; editions of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books appeared with ‘adult’ covers to spare their grown-up readers’ blushes. It’s an unstable, intertextual field, with books referring to and borrowing from each other endlessly. Critically, it’s... read more
Matthew Parris
A Voyage Around the Queen
By Craig Brown
In June 2001, I was at a reception for the president of South Africa at Windsor Castle, deep in conversation with that county’s minister of tourism and irritated that someone was insistently tapping me on the shoulder. Turning around, I realised it was a courtier. Behind him stood Queen Elizabeth II, talking to somebody else. I had not realised that this is how monarchs must socialise: ploughing steadily through the throng with... read more
David Anderson
To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold
By Tim Tate
Peter Wright, son of a long-wave radio pioneer, was a scientist with a talent for improvisation who flourished in the unstructured environment of the Admiralty Research Laboratory during the Second World War. He came to the attention of intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic in 1949, when, as a navy scientist attached to the Marconi Company, he revealed the workings of... read more
Michael Billington
The Critic
By Anand Tucker (dir)
Theatre critics, like cowboys, seem to fascinate filmmakers. All About Eve (1950) is remembered almost as much for George Sanders’s portrayal of an aphoristic Broadway Machiavel, Addison DeWitt, as for Bette Davis’s performance as a falling star. David Niven appeared as an academic turned drama critic in a rather tame comedy, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960), chiefly memorable for prompting John Gielgud to dub Tennessee Williams’s notoriously... read more
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Does the monumental life of WH Auden justify yet another book?
@FionaRSampson considers the latest effort.
Fiona Sampson - Tell Me the Truth About Love
Fiona Sampson: Tell Me the Truth About Love - The Island: W H Auden and the Last of Englishness by Nicholas Jenkins
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Here's Michael Billington's (@billicritic) superb piece for the next @Lit_Review about Anand Tucker's film about 1930s theatre, theatre-going, and theatre reviewing, The Critic, written by Patrick Marber, starring Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton
The theatre has always fascinated filmmakers. Is this latest addition to the long list of theatrical flicks, The Critic, written by Patrick Marber and directed by Anand Tucker, a hit or a flop?
@billicritic gives his verdict.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ring-down-the-curtain