December 2023, Issue 525
The Current Issue
Will Wiles
Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World
By Thomas Heatherwick
In 1989, when Thomas Heatherwick was eighteen years old, he picked up a Taschen book about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in a student book sale. Inside it, he saw a double-page spread showing Gaudí’s Casa Milà, an apartment building in central Barcelona. ‘I was stunned,’ he writes in the introduction to Humanise. ‘I had no idea that buildings like this existed. I had no idea that such buildings could exist.’ The picture had a transformative effect on the young Heatherwick, who was already eyeing a career... read more
More Articles from this Issue
Rowan Williams
On Czesław Miłosz: Visions from the Other Europe
By Eva Hoffman
In a late poem about a friend’s death, Czesław Miłosz writes of the long passage between youth and age as one of learning ‘how to bear what is borne by others’. It could be a summary of his own poetic witness. Eva Hoffman’s moving and eloquent essay traces the ways in which that simultaneously guilty, compassionate and fastidious response characterises Miłosz’s work from its earliest days. Bearing what is borne by others is, for Miłosz, close to the heart of the poetic task... read more
Pratinav Anil
Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States
By John Zubrzycki
'Unruly schoolboys,’ Lord Curzon called them, but then again, he had a penchant for understatement. John Zubrzycki’s new book on India’s last princely rulers is, in fact, Lord of the Flies meets The 120 Days of Sodom. Had Zubrzycki repurposed his material for a novel, he would no doubt have had some stern reviewer scribbling ‘too on the nose’ or ‘uninspired orientalist caricature’ in the margins. Yet the rulers of India’s 562 princely states were for... read more
Joanna Kavenna
Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007
By J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
What the hell is reality and how do we distinguish it from fiction? Who decides? Furthermore, if those who decide the allocations of the real and unreal are cruel, mad or colossally wrong, what then? These are the sorts of questions to which J G Ballard returns again and again in his fiction and non-fiction. His writing career spanned more than five decades. His work ranged from short stories published in New Worlds and... read more
Wendy Moore
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
By Cat Bohannon
We are endlessly fascinated by nature documentaries revealing the remarkable behaviour of the animals that share our planet. And yet most of us know strikingly little about the evolution of our own species and, specifically, almost nothing about how men and women evolved differently. An evolutionary scientist and writer, Cat Bohannon has set out to put matters right with this punchy and utterly compelling book, which not... read more
Andrew Crumey
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Do you fancy living in space? Some people are prepared to pay Virgin Galactic almost half a million dollars for five minutes of weightlessness, so demand is clearly there among the deep-pocketed. And for generations of science fiction fans, life off-planet has been a dream forever just around the corner. If Elon Musk is to be believed, by 2050 there will be a million people living on Mars... read more
Joseph Hone
TJ Wise and his forgeries
Certain names carry with them the whiff of brimstone. In the world of bibliophiles and booksellers, perhaps no name is more sulphurous than that of Thomas James Wise. Celebrated in his lifetime as the greatest collector in a generation, an accolade made even more impressive by his humble origins, Wise is today notorious as a forger of Victorian first editions. His signature method of reprinting minor works by major literary authors with imprints antedating the acknowledged first editions had, by the time... read more
Most Read
moreRowan Williams
On Czesław Miłosz: Visions from the Other Europe
By Eva Hoffman
Pratinav Anil
Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States
By John Zubrzycki
Joanna Kavenna
Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007
By J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
Nicholas Stargardt
Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
By Mary Fulbrook
Will Wiles
Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World
By Thomas Heatherwick
From the Archives
moreFrom the March 2020 issue
Peter Conrad
Warhol: A Life as Art
By Blake Gopnik

From the June 1999 issue
Christopher Hitchens
Some Times in America
By Alexander Chancellor

From the June 1989 issue
Hilary Mantel
What am I Doing Here
By Bruce Chatwin

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The ruler of Gwalior ‘named his son George after the British king. His counterpart in Bahawalpur ... boasted a collection of six hundred dildos, which Pakistan’s generals solicitously buried when they deposed him’.
@pratinavanil on India’s Maharajahs.
Pratinav Anil - Midnight’s Playboys
Pratinav Anil: Midnight’s Playboys - Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States by John Zubrzycki
literaryreview.co.uk
Dec’s Silenced Voices section of @lit_review features the scandalous criminalization of prominent 🇲🇪 academic Boban Batrićević (Faculty of Montenegrin Language & Literature)
His hearing for writing about hateful narratives spread by the Serbian Orthodox Church is on Jan 22nd
⬇️
‘We know that Ballard was many things – novelist, fabulist, one-time assistant editor of “British Baker”, seer of Shepperton, poet laureate of airports. But, it seems, he was not a fan of Mrs Dalloway.’
Joanna Kavenna - Unlimited Dream Company
Joanna Kavenna: Unlimited Dream Company - Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 by J G Ballard (Edited by Mark Blacklock)
literaryreview.co.uk