For People Who Devour Books

The Current Issue

June 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.

June 2019, Issue 476 Paul Broks on schizophrenia * Lucy Lethbridge on Maud West, lady detective * Tom Holland on Pliny * Frances Wilson on the Olivier sisters * Tom Stern on Kierkegaard * Selina Hastings on Chanel on the Côte d'Azur * Howard Davies on a history of capitalism * Alwyn Turner on Nineteen Eighty-Four * Nicholas Vincent on Simon de Montfort * Charlie Pye-Smith on who owns England * Richard Cockett on Burma * David Collard on Gerald Murnane * Lesley Downer on Yasunari Kawabata * Phil Baker on mescaline and much, much more…

Lucy Lethbridge

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective: Secrets and Lies in the Golden Age of Crime

By Susannah Stapleton

Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid one-off and yet somehow entirely of her age. It is not quite a biography and not quite a personal quest, but a bit of both. Tracking her quarry through the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, Stapleton found that West eluded her at every turn. The bewildering array of red herrings, dead ends, fibs, disguises, half-truths and plain deceptions she encountered becomes the story not only of West herself but also of the world in which she lived. The 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of British detective fiction and many of its most famous authors were women... read more

Tom Holland

In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny

By Daisy Dunn

Herculaneum, a town on the Bay of Naples that was buried beneath volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, has only been partially excavated. Some buildings stand open to the sky; others, such as the theatre, can only be accessed through cramped and winding tunnels; many lie entirely entombed within rock. A visitor’s reaction to this can be an interesting gauge of character. The glass-half... read more

Nicholas Roe

The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels

By Adam Nicolson

Returning to England from Belfast, where I taught for a time, I frequently footstepped the Quantock Hills in Somerset, from Wills Neck to West Quantoxhead, following the stream in Holford Combe before crossing the bridge into Alfoxden Park. On one of my treks I paused at the beeches above Alfoxden, startled by two initials cut... read more

Richard V Reeves

A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

By Adam Gopnik

It took liberals just two decades to turn from hubris to hand-wringing. When the Berlin Wall fell, their confidence was unbounded. The ‘End of History’ was declared. Liberalism had won. Today, with the rise of populism, liberals are walking around like clueless tourists, wondering how we ended up here and what to do about it. Liberals forgot three fundamental facts... read more

Paul Broks

The Heartland: Finding and Losing Schizophrenia

By Nathan Filer

Madness is deep-rooted in the human imagination. The mad are unreachable, unfathomable, alarmingly other. They unsettle us. Yet we also romanticise madness. Great poetry and art spring from transcendent states at the edge of sanity, don’t they? And falling in love is a kind of madness, a stumbling into a dream world... read more

Alwyn W Turner

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell's 1984

By Dorian Lynskey

What a difference a decade makes. In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested after the planned invasion, his name wasn’t included. It was, observes Dorian Lynskey in his superb new book... read more

Charlie Pye-Smith

Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Green & Pleasant Land & How to Take It Back

By Guy Shrubsole

‘Landowners like to portray themselves as wise stewards of the earth,’ writes Guy Shrubsole, ‘but all too many of them abuse their property for short-term profit.’ Several years ago, he decided to find out who owned England’s countryside. He was amazed by how... read more