For People Who Devour Books

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September 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.

September 2016, Issue 446 David Ekserdjian on remarkable manuscripts * Germaine Greer on Sharon Olds's Odes * Michael Burleigh on power moving east * Peter Moore on Crusoe's islands * Miranda Seymour on madness in Georgian England * Ted Vallance on violence in England * Mike Jay on the delusions of Philip K Dick * Sheila Fitzpatrick on Zhivago's inspiration * Frances Wilson on Byron's women * Keith Miller on Ian McEwan * Jonathan Meades on Crossrail * William Whyte on rebuilding parliament * Alan Judd on Britain's most decorated Cold War spy * Wendy Moore on bacteria * Kevin Jackson on conjuring tricks * Joanna Kavenna on Dino Buzzati * Sarah Ditum on Jilly Cooper * and much, much more…

David Ekserdjian

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts

By Christopher de Hamel

When, in 1963, G I Gurdjieff called the middle volume of his All and Everything trilogy Meetings with Remarkable Men, he must have thought he had come up with a pretty nifty title. He could hardly have imagined that it would one day be followed by the likes of Thomas Pakenham’s Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996) and the present volume. However, even if this is only the beginning and hundreds of Meetings with… are just around the corner, it seems reasonable to assume that Christopher de Hamel’s remarkable – to fail to coin an alternative adjective – book will effortlessly make it into the top ten. De Hamel singles out a dozen manuscripts for scrutiny, while at the same time alluding to a host of near misses... read more

Germaine Greer

Odes

By Sharon Olds

... An ode to a tampon would once upon a time have been understood as a mock ode, and none but a man would have written it. Olds is evidently in earnest and for that she will not be forgiven. ‘Ode to the Tampon’ is a litany rather than an ode, being no more than a series of epithets that garland the tampon with grandiose attributes. It would be surprising if a seventy-year-old... read more

Jonathan Meades

The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey

By Gillian Tindall

Crossrail, which will eventually come to be known as the Elizabeth Line, is currently an accursed presence in central London, the most massive obstruction to traffic in an agglomeration doldrummed by such obstructions. The area around Centre Point is perpetually chaotic. Gillian Tindall’s ... read more

Keith Miller

Nutshell

By Ian McEwan

... If I now sound my sackbut and praise Nutshell as a return to form, it’s not because of that queasiness, although the easy acceptance of the morbid side of human relations that once led to McEwan being unkindly dubbed Gollum by critics is more in evidence here than it has been for a while. The book is an inventive reworking of Hamlet, narrated by a nearly full-term foetus... read more

Mike Jay

The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick

By Kyle Arnold

Across dozens of novels and well over a hundred short stories, Philip K Dick worried away at one theme above all others: the world is not as it seems. He worked through every imaginable scenario: consensus reality was variously a set of implanted memories, a drug-induced hallucination, a time slip, a covert military simulation... read more

Wendy Moore

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

By Ed Yong

Halfway through reading Ed Yong’s first book, I found myself in A&E with a son in anaphylactic shock after he unwittingly ate some nuts. According to the book I’m reading, I told the medics gathered round his bed, the surge in allergies over the past fifty years could be due to our obsession with ... read more

Michael Burleigh

Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century

By Gideon Rachman

Gideon Rachman’s elegantly written and hugely informed Easternisation is an essential survey of the migration of economic and political power away from the USA and Europe, towards Russia, China and also possibly India in the long term. Will this lead to further examples of the ‘Thucydides trap’, which almost always results in warlike ... read more