For People Who Devour Books

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August 2018

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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.

August 2018, Issue 467 Robert Mayhew on the Endeavour * Frank Prochaska on the British and American empires * Frances Wilson on the allure of the Mediterranean * Thomas Shippey on England's lost King Edmund * Emma Smith on Shakespeare's wife * James Sharpe on Gypsies * Vicky Pryce on Barclays * Natasha Cooper on Jessica Mann * Piers Brendon on Britain in the twentieth century * Dominic Sandbrook on Yuval Noah Harari * Charles Foster on whales * Jane O'Grady on love sickness * Simon Baker on Andrew Miller * Matt Rowland Hill on Edouard Louis * John Sutherland on Robert Graves * Miranda France on Melissa Harrison * and much, much more…

Frances Wilson

The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination

By Robert Holland

‘O for a beaker full of the warm South’, wrote Keats in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Pale, spectre thin and coughing up blood, Keats left London in September 1820 for Italy, where five months later he died, his lungs two shrivelled balloons. It’s hard to understand how a set of dank, cramped rooms by the Spanish Steps was believed to be better for consumption than the wide open skies of Hampstead Heath, but such was the myth of the Mediterranean. He knew nothing about Italy, wrote nothing about Italy and saw little beyond his bed curtains, but the spirit of Romanticism has always been more alive at Keats’s grave in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery than... read more

Thomas Shippey

Edmund: In Search of England’s Lost King

By Francis Young

Recovering and identifying the bones of dead kings has been much in the news recently. Richard III’s skeleton was famously rediscovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012, while in 2014 fragments of a skull found buried in front of the high altar at Hyde Abbey were identified as probably belonging to Alfred the Great, or possibly his son Edward... read more

Robert Mayhew

Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude That Changed the World

By Peter Moore

For readers not of a nautical persuasion, knowing that Captain James Cook’s famous expedition of 1768–71 took place aboard the Endeavour, and that the Endeavour was a type of vessel known as a Whitby collier, probably marks the limit of their interest in the ship that took him to the South Seas. (The really well informed... read more

John Sutherland

Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to 'Good-bye to All That' (1895–1929)

By Jean Moorcroft Wilson

One’s initial response is, why bother? Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s biography of Robert Graves covers the same period as Good-bye to All That. It is no criticism to say that she writes less well than Graves. Nor can any biographer know the life of their subject as well as that person. Nor can anyone who wasn’t unlucky enough... read more

Dominic Sandbrook

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

By Yuval Noah Harari

Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published Sapiens, which told the story of mankind’s entire biological and civilizational history in fewer than five hundred pages and became a colossal worldwide... read more

Simon Baker

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

By Andrew Miller

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it again in his eighth novel, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free. Set in 1809, the story begins with the return to Somerset of Captain John Lacroix, an English soldier who is brought... read more

Jane O'Grady

The Incurable Romantic and Other Unsettling Revelations

By Frank Tallis

Any number of inconvenient feelings and behaviours are now pathologised. You can be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, or as a gambling, shopping or internet addict. Yet, oddly, it seems quaint to us that in the ancient world you could have complained to your doctor of love sickness and been offered a variety of remedies. Frank Tallis... read more