What Vic Gatrell calls bohemians and what Hannah Greig calls the beau monde rubbed shoulders in London in the 18th century, though you would not think so from these books. Greig’s subjects, the people of fashion and privilege who formed an exclusive elite within the elite, are everything Gatrell hates. Their representative in The First […]
Halfway through this tale of piety and plunder in the era of Oliver Cromwell, the reader comes across a telling one-liner from a Puritan divine. It was, wrote Hugh Peter in 1644, a ‘pamphlet-glutted age’. This was rather rich coming from Peter, a bigoted loudmouth who penned scores of tracts of his own, but no […]
The marriage of Catherine of Valois, the attractive young widow of Henry V, and Owen Tudor, a lowly Welsh squire, is a perennial favourite of historical fiction. Indeed, it lends itself well to the genre precisely because there is no reliable information about how and when the couple met. Romantic stories abound. Regardless of whether […]
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, regarded by many as one of the most beneficent agents in the history of espionage, was tried and sentenced to death in Moscow in 1963. Having only by a near miracle escaped that very fate myself in 1985, I naturally have a close personal interest in the subject of this monograph. Half […]
‘In brutal fact, between 1959 and 1962, at least forty-three million Chinese died during the famine … The cause of this disaster, the worst ever to befall China and one of the worst anywhere at any time, was Mao.’ I wrote those words in these pages when reviewing Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine: The History […]
My uncle Fred told a story. A Royal Engineer, he was on leave in the months running up to D-Day and was met off the train at Birmingham by my grandad, Nick. Father and son headed off to a pub at the back of New Street Station. There a man in his late forties came […]
The many admirers of the prize-winning Alice McDermott have waited seven years for her new novel. They will not judge her harshly for adding to the exhausting number of American novels that are now set in Brooklyn. Her pedigree as a three times Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the 1998 National Book Award […]
Avelum was the fifth novel by Otar Chiladze, who died in 2009. It was first published in Georgian in 1995, and now appears in an English translation by Donald Rayfield, a connoisseur of Russian and Georgian literature. Set in the period between two anti-Soviet demonstrations in Tbilisi – the first in March 1956 and the […]
Some rules, to begin. This review will not claim that graphic novels have come of age. This review will not refer to the Costa Book Awards as ‘the turning point’, or even question graphic novels’ legitimacy against other more established art forms. This review will not mention Maus, by Art Spiegelman. And moreover, this review […]
Julia Franck’s early short story ‘Family Friend’ describes a woman who drugs her children so that she can successfully flee with them from East to West Berlin. The devastating prologue to The Blind Side of the Heart, Franck’s superlative novel from 2007 and the first to be translated into English, tracks a desperate, war-ravaged woman’s […]
Patrick McCabe likes to employ disembodied narrators. His last book, The Stray Sod Country, was told by the Devil himself, bent on causing disruption in a small Irish town. McCabe uses the same technique in both parts of this odd book, which is actually a pair of novellas, ‘Hello Mr Bones’ and ‘Goodbye Mr Rat’. […]
Dave Eggers, who used to give the impression of deliberately making each book as unlike its predecessor as possible, has now produced two consecutive novels with a business theme. Last year’s A Hologram for the King, accurately described by Pico Iyer as ‘a kind of Death of a Globalised Salesman’, centred on a man struggling […]
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Galley Beggar Press 203pp £11), published several years after completion having being passed over by mainstream publishers, is a debut of exceptional quality. Its portrayal of lived experience is so intense and its rendering of the mind’s workings so exquisite that it makes most other fêted […]
Subtle Bodies is Norman Rush’s fourth work of fiction, although he is so unheard of outside America that British readers may be forgiven for believing it is his debut. This book is not an obvious candidate to compel a literary coronation. The slimmest novel in Rush’s corpus, it has an opening which gives a fair […]
134lb (g), calories 2000 (vg), embarrassing sexual encounters while reading this book 0, hours of life lost reading this book 7, despair over state of British publishing – total. Bridget Jones is getting older. In the third volume of her diary she is 51, the mother of two children and recently widowed. Who would have […]
Portugal’s neutrality during the Second World War made it a refuge for exiles and expatriates from all over Europe. The influx of spies and refugees into Lisbon inspired Robert Wilson to use it as a backdrop for the thrillers A Small Death in Lisbon and The Company of Strangers. Now David Leavitt finds the city […]
Christopher Reid moves between the most serious considerations of love and death – as in A Scattering, his elegiac tribute to his wife – and entertainments, where he tumbles skittishly about in the playground of words. Six Bad Poets (Faber & Faber 96pp £12.99) is his Dunciad, the dissection of a London zoo where Pope’s […]
As the British government encourages trade with China, much is being written in the Western media about the widespread corruption of state officials. Less is known about the courageous writers, journalists and bloggers in China who attempt to expose that corruption and are increasingly prosecuted and imprisoned for their outspokenness. According to Human Rights Watch, […]
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it is perhaps a compliment that Kevin Sharpe chose for his front cover the same image I used on the hardback of my Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (2005): the coronation portrait of Charles II by John Michael Wright from circa 1661–2. It is a […]
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted and published is a story of subterfuge and duplicity.
Kate Loveman tells the tale.
Kate Loveman - Publishing Pepys
Kate Loveman: Publishing Pepys
literaryreview.co.uk
Arthur Christopher Benson was a pillar of the Edwardian establishment. He was supremely well connected. As his newly published diaries reveal, he was also riotously indiscreet.
Piers Brendon compares Benson’s journals to others from the 20th century.
Piers Brendon - Land of Dopes & Tories
Piers Brendon: Land of Dopes & Tories - The Benson Diaries: Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson by Eamon Duffy & Ronald Hyam (edd)
literaryreview.co.uk
Of the siblings Gwen and Augustus John, it is Augustus who has commanded most attention from collectors and connoisseurs.
Was he really the finer artist, asks Tanya Harrod, or is it time Gwen emerged from her brother’s shadow?
Tanya Harrod - Cut from the Same Canvas
Tanya Harrod: Cut from the Same Canvas - Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The Lives and Loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell
literaryreview.co.uk