For People Who Devour Books

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April 2019

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‘This magazine is flush with tight, smart writing.’
Washington Post

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in London.

April 2019, Issue 474 Alan Hollinghurst on the male body in art * Robert Ferguson on Knausgaard and Munch * Daisy Dunn on Greece and Rome * Raymond Seitz on American diplomacy * Jamie Bartlett on the internet in China and India * Peter Marshall on Empress Matilda * Jane O'Grady on dementia * Jane Ridley on Max Beaverbrook * Tom Stern on Wittgenstein's family letters * Sarah Dunant on a Florentine palazzo * Michael Griffin on Kazakhstan * John Keay on Amritsar * Sebastian Sobecki on Chaucer * Keith Miller on Ali Smith * Peter Conrad on Paolo Sorrentino * and much, much more…

Robert Ferguson

So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch

By Karl Ove Knausgaard (Translated by Ingvild Burkey)

George Bernard Shaw on Henrik Ibsen, Vladimir Nabokov on Nikolai Gogol, Henry Miller on Arthur Rimbaud, Nicholson Baker on John Updike: we are familiar with the genre in which authors write appreciatively about an admired predecessor, usually another writer but sometimes, as in So Much Longing in So Little Space, an artist of a different kind. We expect such books to be at least as much about the author as the subject, and Karl Ove Knausgaard does not disappoint here. What he gives us in essence is an account of what it is like to be a man writing a book about being a man who – somewhat to his own surprise, one suspects – has been invited to curate an exhibition of paintings by... read more

Alan Hollinghurst

Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art

By Patricia Lee Rubin

‘At last!’ was my first reaction to this book: at last a scholarly treatment of a subject I’ve been noticing, pondering and mentally anthologising for much of my life. It’s partly a gay thing, no doubt, to clock the backside of a marble Jason or painted gondolier, surfaces and volumes that polite analysis seems not to register, and to... read more

Jamie Bartlett

Two New Books on Tech in India and China

The only thing the Chinese and Indian experiences of the internet have in common is how ignorant we are about them in the West. Fortunately, two superb and perfectly timed books have arrived to spare our blushes. James Griffiths’s The Great Firewall of China tells the twenty-year story of how the Chinese authorities have brought the internet to heel by slowly... read more

Peter Marshall

Matilda: Empress, Queen, Warrior

By Catherine Hanley

The life story of Matilda (1102–67), empress of Germany and almost-but-not-quite queen of England, contains more dramatic plot twists than a season or three of Game of Thrones. In 1110, her father, King Henry I, last of the sons of William the Conqueror, dispatched her to Liège to become the bride (on reaching twelve) of... read more

Michael Griffin

Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan

By Joanna Lillis

Who are the real Kazakhs? Even by the end of Joanna Lillis’s wide-ranging survey of Central Asia’s wealthiest dictatorship, it’s hard to tell. The livestock-breeding culture of the Kazakh Khanate, a successor to the Mongol Golden Horde, was driven into the ground after its annexation by Russia in ... read more

Clare Bucknell

The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

By Leo Damrosch

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men disappearing up the stairs to a private room. The Club, as Leo Damrosch explains in this group biography of... read more

Keith Miller

Spring

By Ali Smith

When the third instalment in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet intruded though my south London letter box, the daffs on the balcony were waning and the tulips were warming up on the touchline to take their place. The book seems to do more or less what the last two did: apply a certain rough magic to the events of the present and the recent past in a... read more