For People Who Devour Books

The Current Issue

December 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.

December 2019, Issue 482 Paul Theroux on Nathanael West * Jonathan Sumption on Richard III * Catherine Fletcher on Michelangelo's twilight years * Margarette Lincoln on humans & the sea * Rose George on the Bering Strait * Tony Spawforth on the Scythians * Andrew Hussey on the Charlie Hebdo massacre * Cathy Gere on a history of psychiatry * Daniel Beer on Russian bathhouses * Grace Blakeley on women and capitalism * David Gelber on the Braganzas * Kevin Jackson on the colour yellow * Frances Wilson on writers' houses * Donald Rayfield on Nabokov's public prose * William Keegan on the Economist * Lisa Hilton on diamonds * Mark Jarrett on Klemens von Metternich * Joanna Kavenna on artistic memoirs * Michael Schmidt on the Epic of Gilgamesh * Stuart Ritchie on scientific fraudulence * Jonathan Meades on Marseille * James Womack on J M Coetzee * James Riding on Sarah Hall * and much, much more…

Catherine Fletcher

Michelangelo, God’s Architect

By William E Wallace

In 1545, the year in which he turned seventy, Michelangelo Buonarroti completed his last public sculpture, the tomb of Pope Julius II in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome. Others might have settled into a well-deserved retirement, looking back on a triumphant career. Not Michelangelo, who went on to spend the best part of the next two decades fixing a disastrous building project at St Peter’s in Rome and designing the dome that now dominates the city’s skyline... read more

Donald Rayfield

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor

By Vladimir Nabokov (Edited by Brian Boyd & Anastasia Tolstoy)

This generous collection of 154 pieces of what Brian Boyd in the introduction calls Nabokov’s ‘public prose’ – mostly uncollected and sometimes also unpublished journalism – is presented chronologically. Where necessary, the pieces have been expertly translated from Russian... read more

Margarette Lincoln

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

By David Abulafia

In 2003, archaeologists excavating a cave shelter on the island of Flores, Indonesia, discovered the remains of early humans, remarkably over eighteen thousand years old. Even more surprisingly, the bones showed that these people were only about a metre tall and had brains no larger than a fizzy-drink can. Flores is one of a cluster of small... read more

Paul Theroux

On Nathanael West

Nothing in the books I knew at the time reflected what I saw and felt growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s in the United States. This was before the stereotypical 1960s began in earnest, around 1963, with the Beatles and Dylan, organised protest and the demands for radical change. Until then it was an era of confusion and weirdness, unwritten about, as far as I could tell. I was a mediocre student, a loose fit in a big unruly family... read more

Thomas Blaikie

Because Internet: Understanding How Language is Changing

By Gretchen McCulloch

This is quite a jolly academic book written by a linguist for the general reader about internet language. It has already had considerable success in America. The curious thing is that it’s a book at all. Hasn’t the internet killed off books? Why isn’t it a podcast or a live download or whatever? What is the language of the internet... read more

William Keegan

Liberalism at Large: The World according to the Economist

By Alexander Zevin

Although as fallible as any newspaper or periodical, The Economist has a great reputation. Its weekly issues almost reek of confident and well-informed authority. This sense of authority is especially recognised by the American political, financial and business elites. Successive editors in recent decades... read more

James Womack

The Death of Jesus

By J M Coetzee

Is it just a writer’s insecurity? As though worried that he, or we, might forget what he’s up against, J M Coetzee regularly produces books that measure themselves alongside canonical predecessors: Life & Times of Michael K wears its debt to Kafka in its title, just as Foe beckons to Robinson Crusoe. The Master of Petersburg is a fantasia that bends Dostoevsky into The Brothers... read more