For People Who Devour Books

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February 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.

February 2019, Issue 472 David Abulafia on how classical ideas were lost and found * Tim Blanning on conceptions of time in German history * Helen Hackett on Nicholas Hilliard * Andrew Hussey on France's precarious politics * Roy Greenslade on Jill Abramson * John Gray on Eric Hobsbawm * Catherine Brown on Teffi * Will Wiles ventures underground * Agnès Poirier on Michael Peppiatt * Kathleen Burk on silver * Christopher Hart on Auberon Waugh * Pamela Norris on Tessa Hadley * Matt Rowland Hill on Adam Foulds * and much, much more…

Helen Hackett

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist

By Elizabeth Goldring

According to Elizabeth Goldring in this engrossing biography, the earliest recorded use of the term ‘miniature’ in English literature comes in Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance The New Arcadia, written in the early 1580s. Four ladies bathe and splash playfully in the River Ladon, personified as male, and he responds delightedly by making numerous bubbles, as if ‘he would in each of those bubbles set forth the miniature of them’. It’s a pleasing image, calling to mind the delicacy and radiance of the works of Nicholas Hilliard, the leading miniaturist (or ‘limner’) of the Elizabethan age, whom Sidney knew and with whom he discussed emerging ideas about the theory and practice of art. In some ways, a miniature had the ephemerality of a bubble, capturing an individual at a fleeting moment in time, often recorded in an inscription... read more

David Abulafia

The Map of Knowledge: How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found – A History in Seven Cities

By Violet Moller

Adelard of Bath would be in demand in the present day. This 12th-century English scholar, arrayed in his striped hat, brilliant green or red cape and lapis lazuli shirt, ‘had a talent’, Violet Moller explains, ‘for communicating complex scientific ideas and adapting them for an amateur, but interested, audience’. Yet he also devoted a good part... read more

John Gray

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History

By Richard J Evans

The life of Eric Hobsbawm is a study in the making of a reputation. Like many other intellectuals who spent their early years in interwar central Europe, he turned to communism as a means of resisting fascism and Nazism. Unlike many of these writers and thinkers, he never renounced his commitment to communism. Until the end of his long life he continued... read more

Agnès Poirier

The Existential Englishman: Paris Among the Artists

By Michael Peppiatt

Part confession, part meditation on artists, Michael Peppiatt’s memoir about being an Englishman in Paris from 1966 to 1994 and again since 2014 probably reveals more than the author had intended. Often candid about his failures and inability to stick to the great literary ambitions of his youth, the well-known biographer of Francis Bacon... read more

Andrew Hussey

Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France

By Christophe Guilluy (Translated by Malcolm DeBevoise)

A week or so before the election in May 2017 that brought Emmanuel Macron to power, I interviewed a senior academic at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, wishing to understand where Macron would be taking France if he won. The response from the professor was gloomy. This was, he said, first... read more

Christopher Hart

A Scribbler in Soho: A Celebration of Auberon Waugh

By Naim Attallah

Before beginning to write this review, I read that a lady in Portland, Oregon, has just exposed her bottom to a policeman in protest against a ‘men’s rights’ march. Even a connoisseur of human lunacy like Auberon Waugh might struggle to satirise the way the world is going nowadays, some eighteen years after his death. Besides... read more

Matt Rowland Hill

Dream Sequence

By Adam Foulds

What is fiction to do with a world in which intimate human connection is increasingly mediated – or even replaced – by images on screens? Dream Sequence, the fourth novel by Adam Foulds, is the story of a relationship whose two parties are almost perfect strangers to one another. Almost, but not quite: Henry, a handsome British actor, and Kristin, a well-off American divorcee, once crossed paths... read more