For People Who Devour Books

The Current Issue

November 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.

November 2019, Issue 481 Owen Matthews on President Erdoğan * Richard Vinen on Thatcher's later years * Susan Owens on the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood * Patrick McGuinness on Samuel Pozzi * Anna Reid on famine in the USSR * Martin Bell on John Hersey reporting on Hiroshima * Dennis Duncan on Oulipo * Avi Shilon on David Ben-Gurion * Edward Behrens on interior design * Patrick Wilcken on explorers in the Amazon * Jerry White on London through the ages * Maurice Frank on East Berlin samizdat * Tanya Harrod on Lucian Freud * Jane O’Grady on loneliness * Bill Bell on reading * Joseph Owen on football's failures * Cornelius Dieckmann on André Aciman * Hannah Rosefield on Ben Lerner * Kate McLoughlin on Elizabeth Strout * and much, much more…

Patrick Mcguinness

Samuel Pozzi, Doctor & Dandy

Julian Barnes’s new book immerses us in Belle Epoque Paris through the life of Samuel Pozzi, the sitter in John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait Dr Pozzi at Home. ‘Is it unfair to begin with the coat, rather than the man inside it?’ asks Barnes. ‘But the coat, or rather its depiction, is how we remember him today, if we remember him at all.’ Pozzi is an excellent choice of subject, because he is both straightforward and enigmatic, and because, though he knew everyone and turns up in numerous memoirs, letters and newspaper articles of the period, enough of his character remains just out of reach for Barnes to relish the challenge of imagining... read more

Owen Matthews

Erdoğan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey

By Hannah Lucinda Smith

Twenty years ago, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was serving time in Pınarhisar jail, west of Istanbul, imprisoned as a dangerous radical for publicly reciting a religious poem. Today he is a latter-day sultan, a man who regularly addresses million-strong crowds and commands a personality cult almost as powerful as that... read more

Susan Owens

Pre-Raphaelite Sisters

By Jan Marsh, with contributions by Peter Funnell, Charlotte Gere, Pamela Gerrish Nunn & Alison Smith

In 1850 Elizabeth Siddal was stitching bonnets in a back room of Mrs Tozer’s millinery in Cranbourne Alley, near Leicester Square, when she was glimpsed through an open door by the young artist Walter Deverell. Struck by her beauty, he persuaded his mother – the reason he was... read more

Martin Bell

Mr Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima

By Jeremy Treglown

War reporters come in many types and guises (and degrees of honesty). John Hersey was at the peak of the profession during the Second World War, rivalled among Americans only by the GIs’ own journalist, the immortal Ernie Pyle. Hersey thoroughly deserves this full-length ... read more

Richard Vinen

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Three – Herself Alone

By Charles Moore

Curiously, Margaret Thatcher seemed a more distant figure in 2013, just after her death, when Charles Moore published the first volume of his biography of her, than she does now. Then, while the economic aspects of Thatcherism... read more

Dennis Duncan

The Penguin Book of Oulipo

By Philip Terry (ed)

Literature, it goes without saying, has many more tricks up its sleeve than rhyme, metre and the dramatic unities. Take the Book of Lamentations. Four of its five chapters are alphabetic acrostics, its verses beginning, in order, with the letter aleph, then beth, then gimmel, and so on through the... read more

Cornelius Dieckmann

Find Me

By André Aciman

One of the most moving passages in André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me by Your Name is a heart-to-heart between father and son at a moment when seemingly all is said and done. Elio Perlman, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, has just bid a tearful farewell to Oliver, the young academic who... read more