For People Who Devour Books

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June 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.

June 2017, Issue 454 Ben Hutchinson on Goethe in full * David Wheatley on T S Eliot's seventh volume of letters * Edith Hall on Greek and Roman myths and folk tales * Jonathan Steinberg on Jew Süss * Jane Ridley on Maud Russell's war diaries * Edward Dolnick on a forger's art * Oliver Balch on two wild swimming memoirs * Michael Hunter on Hans Sloane * Daisy Dunn on the Gauls * Michael Burleigh on Iran's Revolutionary Guards * Piers Brendon on Barack Obama * Michael Bloch on being gay in London * Sarah Ditum on self-obsession * John Lloyd on a career of reportage * Nakul Krishna on Arundhati Roy * James Purdon on Will Self * Jason Burke on book smuggling in Timbuktu * and much, much more…

Ben Hutchinson

Goethe: Life as a Work of Art

By Rüdiger Safranski (Translated by David Dollenmayer)

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has been subsumed into the ‘Elizabethan age’. That the ‘age of Goethe’ (Goethezeit) should have become a standard term for the years spanning the Weimar poet’s active life – roughly, 1770 to 1830 – suggests, then, his overwhelming importance to the German psyche. Without Goethe, one might say, the great tradition of high culture that characterises modern Germany would never have begun; without Goethe, the archetypes of the national imagination – the raging Werther, the ageing Faust – would never have... read more

Jonathan Steinberg

The Many Deaths of Jew Süss

The story of Jew Süss took place at the dawn of the modern era. The Holy Roman Empire still functioned but many observers thought it an absurd antique. As Voltaire sneered in 1756, ‘it’s not holy, not Roman and not an empire’. The essence of the Holy Roman Empire was the minute... read more

Daisy Dunn

Caesar’s Footprints: Journeys to Roman Gaul

By Bijan Omrani

Some of the most colourful passages of Greek and Latin literature describe the people of Gaul. There are haughty, bellicose Gauls, drunk Gauls, Gauls who sleep on straw like animals, Gauls who make severed heads into necklaces... read more

Piers Brendon

Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

By David J Garrow

Barack Obama joined the long line of US presidents in 2008, sandwiched between a yahoo and a buffoon. What voters saw when they elected him was not just an African American, but a politician who was humane, rational, honest, progressive... read more

Sarah Ditum

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed & What It’s Doing to Us

By Will Storr

The idea that all of us have a self – essential, irreducible and inherently valuable – is something that’s accepted across social divisions, party-political lines and ideological differences. The mere suggestion that the existence of the self... read more

John Lloyd

War and the Death of News: Reflections of a Grade B Reporter

By Martin Bell

A work whose title links war to the ‘death of news’ must prove a malign relationship between the two, and this one doesn’t. News isn’t dead; neither war nor Donald Trump has killed it. Martin Bell’s lament is the cry of someone whose view... read more

Jad Adams

Past Mortems: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors

By Carla Valentine

When she was a child, Carla Valentine used to wonder what it felt like to be a corpse. She would direct her friends to take part in funerals for roadkill they found. While her contemporaries went off to learn languages or travel... read more