For People Who Devour Books

The Current Issue

August 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.

August 2019, Issue 478 Richard Carwardine on Frederick Douglass * Piers Brendon on Enoch Powell's obsessions * John Keay on Partition * Norma Clarke on Mrs Delany * Paul Johnson on the influence of economists * Helen Bynum on skin and bones * Helen Pearson on how we spend our time * Tim Whitmarsh on a history of philosophy * Jay Parini on Auden's 'September 1, 1939' * Laura Freeman on fantastical art * Thomas Shippey on epics around Europe * Adam Douglas on shapeshifters * Zeb Soanes on weather forecasting * James Womack on Vasily Grossman * Salley Vickers on Deborah Eisenberg * Matt Rowland Hill on Salman Rushdie * and much, much more…

Richard Carwardine

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

By David W Blight

Frederick Douglass – runaway slave, radical activist, brilliant orator and writer, tireless advocate for his race, political office-holder – lays claim to being the most influential African-American of all time. Certainly, no other black American life has been more remarkable or significant, and few other lives, black or white, have lent themselves, as did Douglass’s, to the publication of three separate and bestselling autobiographies, each of them an essential source for a biographer. In his mid-twenties, newly established as an abolitionist celebrity, he wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a dramatic account in simple but vivid prose of his twenty years as a Maryland slave... read more

Piers Brendon

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain

By Paul Corthorn

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he became the youngest professor in the British Empire. A published poet, a talented clarinettist, a master of many languages, a translator of Herodotus and a devotee of Nietzsche, he enlisted as a private soldier... read more

John Keay

Partition Voices: Untold British Stories

By Kavita Puri

A Britain without the South Asian British is now almost unthinkable. With a few exceptions – farming, fishing and the armed forces spring to mind – there are few sectors of UK life where the descendants of South Asian immigrants are not prominent. Kavita Puri, for example, author of the harrowing Partition Voices, is a distinguished broadcaster whose father, Ravi, relocated from Delhi... read more

Helen Pearson

What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research

By Jonathan Gershuny & Oriel Sullivan

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes published an essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in which he anticipated how we would spend our time a hundred years ahead. Keynes predicted that future generations would enjoy such an improved standard of living that they might... read more

Salley Vickers

Your Duck Is My Duck

By Deborah Eisenberg

Reading Deborah Eisenberg’s latest collection of stories, Your Duck Is My Duck, was for me like going to a party hoping to get away as quickly as politeness allowed and at 4am finding myself still engrossed in conversation with the most delightfully absorbing new acquaintance – which is an elaborate... read more

Jay Parini

September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem

By Ian Sansom

In this difficult-to-classify book, Ian Sansom – best known for his mystery novels, which I’ve read and enjoyed – rambles through (or beside) one of the great modern poems: ‘September 1, 1939’ by W H Auden. It’s a poem I’ve read many times over the past forty years or so. Like Sansom, I’ve... read more

Matt Rowland Hill

Quichotte

By Salman Rushdie

Opening a new Salman Rushdie novel after reading almost any other contemporary writer is like stepping off a plane in Mumbai, or New York in a heatwave: it immediately hits you how much milder and quieter things are back home. Quichotte overwhelms you from the first page with a lightning storm of... read more