For People Who Devour Books

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December 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.

December 2020, Issue 492 H Kumarasingham on British slavery * Karina Urbach on Nazis & nobles * William Boyd on meeting Billy Wilder * Elizabeth Lowry on Vivien Eliot * Lawrence Freedman on Barack Obama * Joanna Kavenna on writers & the weather * Henry Gee on fungi * Andrew Adonis on merit * David Anderson on GCHQ * Richard Vinen on wine in Algeria * David Wheatley on John Berryman's letters * Tom Stern on the Vienna Circle * Susan Owens on Ruskin's art * Salley Vickers on midlife * Andrew Hussey on Jacques Derrida * Anthony Cummins on Richard Owain Roberts * Patricia T O'Conner on Angela Thirkell * James Purdon on Don DeLillo * and much, much more…

Tim Stanley

Too Nice to Be President?

This is the definitive Jimmy Carter anecdote. Once, when he was president, a bemused journalist asked if it was true that the leader of the free world was in charge of the schedule for the White House tennis court. Of course not, said Carter; don’t be silly. What he had done was tell staff they must speak to his secretary if they wanted to book a tennis session. That way, he elaborated, people cannot use the court simultaneously ‘unless they [are] either on opposite sides of the net or engaged in a doubles contest’. Honest, wonky and utterly without humour, Carter was probably one of the smartest American presidents and, consequently, one of the worst. Two new accounts of his time in office bring clarity and depth to the record, albeit with varying degrees of sympathy. As Jonathan Alter argues... read more

Karina Urbach

Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance

By Stephan Malinowski (Translated from German by Jon Andrews)

In the closing scene of the film Valkyrie, Hitler’s would-be assassin Count Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise, is about to be shot by a firing squad when his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, suddenly throws himself in front of him. The adjutant takes the bullets and Stauffenberg utters... read more

Xan Smiley

A Brutal State of Affairs: The Rise and Fall of Rhodesia

By Henrik Ellert & Dennis Anderson

The authors of this book paint a detailed and dispassionate yet wrenching picture of the painful and bloody transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in the period following the white leader Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. Their main gift to historians is... read more

Patricia T O'Conner

On Barsetshire

I’m always reminded of Angela Thirkell as Christmas casts its thick gloom (her word, not mine) upon a weary world. ‘No one has ever yet described with sufficient hatred and venom this Joyous and Festive Season,’ she once wrote. A rector in her Barsetshire novels privately regards the Second World War as ‘little but an intensification of Christmas’. And a mother of four grown sons... read more

Salley Vickers

The Midlife Mind: Literature and the Art of Ageing

By Ben Hutchinson

Ben Hutchinson, a mere forty-three, considers that he has reached middle age. In this I suggest he is being a little doomy, but no more so, perhaps, than one of the authors to whom he turns for wisdom and philosophical support, Michel de Montaigne, who retired from political and social life at the ripe old age of thirty-eight to his ‘citadel’ in the Dordogne to compose his meditative essays... read more

H Kumarasingham

The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

By Michael Taylor

Do you think a human life is worth £5,800? That was the upper end of the value placed on an individual African’s life (in today’s money) when compensation for slave ‘property’ was being negotiated in 1833. When emancipation came the year after in the British West Indies, it did not mean freedom. Instead, existing slaves became ‘apprentices’ and in many cases... read more

William Boyd

My Evening with Marilyn

Reading Jonathan Coe’s fascinating new novel, Mr Wilder and Me, I was reminded of my one and only meeting with Billy Wilder. It was in London in 1993, at the house of a friend. Wilder and his wife, Audrey, were among the guests at the small dinner party. Wilder was eighty-six by then and was on genial good form. We were encouraged to get him to anecdotalise about his years in Hollywood. Thus prompted, I asked him a no doubt familiar question: what was Marilyn Monroe... read more