For People Who Devour Books

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October 2016

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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.

October 2016, Issue 447 Lucy Hughes-Hallett on Angela Carter * Martin Vander Weyer on Alan Greenspan * Nicholas Roe on Thomas Hardy in London * Kevin Jackson on Kenneth Clark * Mary Kenny on British fascism * Harry Mount on Leigh Fermor's letters * Donald Rayfield on Stalin's attitude to science * Anne Somerset on powerful queens * Philip Parker on vikings in their own words * Giles Milton on John le Carré * Judith Vidal-Hall on Enver Hoxha * Patrick Scrivenor on our feline friends * Joan Smith on Rachel Cusk * Jude Cook on Paul Beatty * and much, much more…

Douglas Smith

Setting the Wheels in Motion: Two Books on the Russian Revolution

The year 2016, the anteroom to the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917, has already brought us several books that, in various ways, speak to the epochal events that brought down a 300-year-old regime and ushered in the utopian experiment of the Soviet Union. Most notable of these are Simon Sebag Montefiore’s engrossing 'The Romanovs' and 'Historically Inevitable? Turning Points of the Russian Revolution', a collection of essays edited by Tony Brenton, a former British ambassador to Moscow. In 'Lenin on the Train', the distinguished historian Catherine Merridale provides one more look at this revolutionary year, retracing what she calls ‘a journey that changed the world’, the eight-day trek by rail and ferry in April 1917 undertaken by Lenin ... read more

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The Invention of Angela Carter

By Edmund Gordon

Winners of the Somerset Maugham Award for young authors are required to spend their prize money on foreign travel. Angela Carter, the 1969 winner, lit out for the Orient. She abandoned Paul Carter, her husband of nine years standing... read more

Anne Somerset

Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe

By Sarah Gristwood

Sarah Gristwood’s sweeping survey of the careers of numerous royal women in 16th-century Europe amply justifies the nod to Game of Thrones in the title: it features enough dynastic conflict, violence and sexual intrigue... read more

Nicholas Roe

Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner

By Mark Ford

‘What contrasting planes of existence he moved in – vibrating at a swing between the artificial gaieties of a London season and the quaintnesses of a primitive rustic life.’ So, late in his long life, Thomas Hardy described the self-division... read more

Jason Burke

Raising the Black Flag

Amid the many, many books published in recent months on Islamic militancy, the Muslim faith and Islamic history, two stand out. 'United States of Jihad' is a rigorous, balanced, clear-eyed and perceptive overview of violent Islamic extremism in the USA. Its author, Peter Bergen, is an excellent... read more

Kevin Jackson

Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and 'Civilisation'

By James Stourton

Lord Clark did not want for detractors. Plenty of people found him chilly, arrogant, complacent and self-deceived. Some of his fellow art historians thought him unscholarly and superficial (and others thought him first-rate)... read more

Harry Mount

Dashing for the Post: The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor

By Adam Sisman (ed)

Anthony Powell said that John Betjeman had ‘a whim of iron’. To judge by these compulsive letters, Patrick Leigh Fermor had a pleasure-loving streak of purest titanium. From the first letter,... read more