For People Who Devour Books

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July 2020

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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.

July 2020, Issue 488 Michael Burleigh on soft power * Fran Bigman on swimming * Patricia Fara on merpeople * John Banville on William James * David Abulafia on ancient cities * Sean O'Brien on Larkin & Hull * Richard Vinen on Churchill myths * Richard V Reeves on modern liberalism * Will Wiles on bunkers * Roger Highfield on science fictions * Felicity Cloake on food myths * James Delbourgo on minimalism & collecting * Donald Rayfield on Vladimir Putin * Philip Parker on Alaric the Goth * Richard Canning on the world's queer frontiers * Emma Griffin on sport in England * Sarah Ditum on Ali Smith * Joan Smith on Curtis Sittenfeld * Melanie White on Callan Wink * and much, much more…

Fran Bigman

The Life Aquatic

Until I read Howard Means’s Splash! and Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, my main encounter with the history of the sport had been a Victorian-inspired swimming gala organised by members of my local team at north London’s Parliament Hill Lido. We competed in novelty races that predated the streamlining of swimming into a competitive sport, swimming upright holding umbrellas in one race, wearing blindfolds in another. We jumped into the pool in vintage dresses to see what it was like to swim hampered by heavy fabrics. I learned much from both books. The first-known depictions of swimming are pictographs made eight thousand years ago on the walls of the so-called Cave of the Swimmers in the middle of the Sahara, where there were once deep-water lakes. The ancient Greeks often triumphed in battle due to their swimming prowess. After the fall of the Roman Empire, swimming all but vanished from Europe... read more

David Goodhart

Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends

By Anne Applebaum

This is an illuminating political memoir about the break-up of the political tribe that won the Cold War. It can be read with profit even if you disagree, as I do, with the thesis it is wrapped up in. The author, Anne Applebaum, is a distinguished American journalist and a historian of, in particular, the Soviet Union and its horrors. She is ... read more

John Banville

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life

By John Kaag

To start with, let us be clear on one thing: William James cannot save your life. His books, his thought, his dicta are capable of enriching and amplifying the workings of your mind and even of your emotions, if you are suitably receptive. It may even be that the example of how he dealt with his own difficulties may shed a light on how you might deal with... read more

Will Wiles

Bunker: Building for the End Times

By Bradley Garrett

What is a bunker? The term derives from an Old Swedish word meaning ‘boards used to protect the cargo of a ship’. But if we take it, as we usually do, to mean a defended structure, often underground, intended to shield people and important goods through a period of strife, then it is one of the oldest building types made by humans. In Cappadocia, central Turkey, there are... read more

Philip Parker

Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome

By Douglas Boin

Edward Gibbon, the 18th-century chronicler of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, memorably described the Gothic ruler Alaric as ‘a victorious leader, who united the daring spirit of a barbarian with the art and discipline of a Roman general’. The Roman poet Claudian, a... read more

James Delbourgo

Gardens of Emptiness

If there are svelte hoarders and corpulent minimalists, they don’t appear in popular culture. But not everyone who bulk-bought canned goods and toilet paper during our spring of pandemic discontent can have been corpulent or incontinent. Experts in psychology readily proclaimed that the instinct to grab in times of woe is universal. Hoarding is a default response to perceptions ... read more

Sarah Ditum

Summer

By Ali Smith

What is to be done with hope? Ali Smith is a great artist of possibility. Think of the role chance plays in her work, from The Accidental to How to be Both’s thrillingly shuffled structure that meant you had a fifty-fifty chance of getting the contemporary narrative first or the historical one. But these are bleak times – from Smith’s perspective, anyway... read more