For People Who Devour Books

The Current Issue

September 2017

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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.

September 2017, Issue 457 Jan Morris on four winds * Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on the great Nadar * Selina Hastings on A B Mitford & the birth of Japan * Robert Service on Gorbachev * John Gray on Charles Darwin * D J Taylor on Salman Rushdie * Catherine Peters on greedy Queen Victoria * Christopher Andrew on the Cold War * Diane Purkiss on the myth of Adam & Eve * Felipe Fernández-Armesto on the Mediterranean & the Atlantic * Robert Irwin on the Knights Templar * Jonathan Meades on the Age of Decadence * Sarah Ditum on Kathy Acker * James Womack on J M Coetzee's essays * Fiona Stafford on British trees * Anne Chisholm on Claire Messud * and much, much more…

Diane Purkiss

The Rise and Fall of Adam & Eve

By Stephen Greenblatt

In Dürer’s etching they stand with their heads bent, about to take the fatal bite. In Masaccio’s fresco they flee, Eve’s mouth gaping in agony. The Fall of Man has fascinated many: it’s when we become mortal, knowing and sexual all at once. In this new book, Stephen Greenblatt turns his attention to Adam and Eve. In a departure for Greenblatt, this is an attempt at a full cultural history of the kind we might associate with Marina Warner. It was triggered by a visit to a pairadaeza, an old Persian garden, in Iran. He describes reaching, after driving for hours through desert, ‘a relatively small, dusty, square space with very old cedar trees lined up in rows along very straight paths... read more

Robert Service

Gorbachev: His Life and Times

By William Taubman

It is one of the paradoxes of Soviet history that Mikhail Gorbachev, who did more than any other Kremlin leader to show his ‘personal’ side to a watching world, has eluded his biographers. Nobody before William Taubman has achieved an in-depth psychological portrait. Political accounts have been two a penny; economic and ideological studies have come at a discount. But what made Gorbachev tick... read more

Jan Morris

Where the Wild Winds Are: Walking Europe’s Winds from the Pennines to Provence

By Nick Hunt

This extraordinary work is a prime example of that contemporary genre, the ex-travel book. Travel writing as such being a bit obsolete now, since so many readers have been everywhere, the form has evolved into something more interpretative or philosophical. Where the Wild Winds Are is a work of this sort – a thoughtful... read more

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

On the Ocean: The Mediterranean and the Atlantic from Prehistory to AD 1500

By Barry Cunliffe

Simplify – but not, please, in the manner of, say, Liam Fox – your image of Europe. Envisage its elementary geometry as an arrowhead pointing into the ocean from Asia. The Mediterranean and Atlantic mark the edges. Roughly bisecting the angle is a long watershed of highlands and boglands, from which almost all major rivers flow... read more

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera

By Adam Begley

Adam Begley’s book begins with an image of the 19th-century French photographer Nadar drifting among the clouds in a hot air balloon. Wearing a top hat and a floppy cravat, with a tartan blanket casually draped over one shoulder, he is depicted not as an ordinary traveller but as ‘a dandy of the air’. An uncropped... read more

Sarah Ditum

Assessing Kathy Acker

Kathy Acker is a difficult subject for a biography, largely because, as Chris Kraus notes at the outset of her book, she ‘lied all the time’. Every bit of Acker’s life tended to be fed back through the creative mill, becoming a part of either her experimental writings or her other great project, the invention of Kathy Acker: a pixie-cropped, tattooed, muscle-strapped... read more

D J Taylor

The Golden House

By Salman Rushdie

To New York, in the opening days of the Obama presidency, from a country that for some reason cannot be named but is clearly India, in conditions of considerable secrecy, come the Golden clan. Their number is initially set at four: ageing but sappy potentate Nero (‘he exuded a heavy, cheap odour, the unmistakable smell of crass, despotic danger’... read more