It is strange to think that Rose Tremain is always more concerned with outsiders than insiders. To those familiar only with her best-selling, prize-winning novels like Restoration, Music & Silence and most recently The Colour, she has acquired a lustrous Establishment sheen as the respectable face of historical fiction. Yet just as impressive, and interesting, […]
The last of the six volumes of Armistead Maupin’s hugely successful Tales of the City appeared in 1989. Now he has produced what is, he insists, not an addition but a pendant to it. To allay any possible disappointment, the jacket declares that ‘a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way’. But these […]
I liked this book very much. Quoting from Dombey and Son in his epigraph – ‘“We are dreadfully real, Mr Carker”, said Mrs Skewton; “are we not?”’ – Adam Thorpe announces that he has set out to write a story about the particular intensities of ordinary people. Jack Middleton, a composer, visits Estonia hoping to […]
Yukio Mishima lived in a Spanish baroque house that he designed himself and stuffed with European antiques. A visiting French TV documentary crew asked him, inevitably, where all the Japanese art was and why he lived like a Westerner. He replied, ‘here only what you cannot see is Japanese’.
The appearance of a new work by J R R Tolkien is a major literary event. It is true that the same dark story, of the ill-starred Túrin Turambar, has appeared before, in different fragments, as part of the corpus of Tolkien’s posthumously published writings, edited by his son Christopher over the past thirty years; […]
Famously, most of the defining novels about California have not been produced by Californians. The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, The Big Sleep, The Loved One, The Crying of Lot 49, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Tales of the City – all written by authors for whom […]
A M Homes, novelist and New Yorker, was in her thirties when her adoptive mother received a telephone call from a lawyer saying that Homes’s biological mother wanted to get in touch with her. In 1961, Ellen Bellman, a young shop assistant having an affair with her married boss, had given up her newborn daughter […]
Even in this golden age of autobiography, Brian Thompson’s Keeping Mum made a deservedly huge impact when it appeared last year. The catastrophic marriage between his manic-depressive mother (Peggy, aka Squibs) and ruthlessly unfeeling, upwardly mobile father (Bert), the irrational decision to send him during the war from safe Cambridge to his uncle and aunt […]
Housman, one of the egregious eccentrics of English poetry, was the son of a busy solicitor who practised in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. He had two sisters and four brothers, one of whom, Laurence, wrote a West End smash, Victoria Regina. He had a passion for Latin and Greek but not much interest in classical history and […]
Ed Husain begins one of the chapters of The Islamist with a quotation from Syed Qutb, the chief intellectual founder of Islamism, outlining the purpose of Qutb’s most influential book: ‘I have written Milestones for this vanguard of Islamists which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be realised.’ Qutb’s use of the […]
Tim Butcher was for a while the Daily Telegraph’s man in Africa. In 2002, he chose a lull in the conflict that has riven the Democratic Republic of Congo since the fall of Mobutu in 1994 to follow the route of H M Stanley’s epic journey between October 1876 and September 1877 from the western […]
Anyone who takes these books to heart will wonder whether we are in a situation ominously similar to that of 1935, when the menace of Hitler’s Germany left the bulk of Britain’s and America’s politicians completely unperturbed. In one way we are worse off: at least during the Thirties there was Winston Churchill, with the […]
Long-term admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski may be disappointed to learn that in Travels with Herodotus, his last work, the Polish journalist and writer is mellower, kinder, warmer than in books published in the spit and fury of his younger years. The opening lines – a description of the moment when, as a young student in […]
In 1978, the author of this book, an academic based in South Africa, first glimpsed the name Joseph Lis in a late-Victorian newspaper cutting. Lis (meaning ‘fox’), who later adopted the surname Silver, was a Polish-born pimp and sex-trafficker extraordinaire – a violent, syphilitic super-criminal, who during his thirty-year career had the police forces and […]
With his wild hair, merry eyes, baggy T-shirt and sockless ankles, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) looked the way the world wants a scientist to look. ‘Why does everybody love me when nobody understands me?’ he puzzled. Some of the explanation for his celebrity may lie in a gift for aphorism that has been compared to Oscar […]
The public intellectual is an increasingly rare species. I don’t mean academic celebrities with their television series and regular op-ed columns. Public intellectuals are men or women of considerable intellectual attainment, usually professors at the older universities, who are also committed to public service where their wisdom and experience are admired and their judgement sought. […]
Writing a biography of the Emperor Napoleon requires an ambition that is, well, Napoleonic. Fortunately, few people alive know as much about Napoleon Bonaparte as Philip Dwyer, biographer of Talleyrand and Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Newcastle in Australia. This life of his hero in two volumes – of which […]
Once barely noticed, the history of the anti-slavery campaign has gathered such momentum that it has now become the central narrative of Our Island Story. The hero of this tale is William Wilberforce, and a new biography is overdue. Wilberforce’s struggle to ban slavery has been dramatised in the biopic Amazing Grace. Now, nicely timed […]
Politicians who find themselves out of office for a long time or in voluntary retirement are in need of employment. Some go quiet, finding solace in watercolours and golf-clubs. For others, the House of Lords is a consolation. One or two in each generation however, take to writing history. Lord Rosebery dabbled and so did […]
An obsession with image and corporate logos long predates designer labels and the global marketplace. Back in the 1930s firms like Shell and Guinness were nimble practitioners of ‘branding’, as were go-ahead publishers – so much so that books and authors sometimes seemed to play second fiddle to the promotion of their publishers, with the […]
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