Not quite understanding the title of Jonathan Meades’s new collection of essays, Pedro and Ricky Come Again, is no bar to enjoying them. Meades acknowledges the potential trouble on the first page, devoting a few sentences to half-heartedly explaining the reference (it alludes to a previous collection, from 1989, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, the […]
Flashing his gigawatt smile, Richard Branson safely emerged from his spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo, in July after it touched down in New Mexico at the end of its first fully crewed flight. The champagne-chugging began. Only nine days later, Jeff Bezos followed him to the edge of space, riding Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle. These two successful […]
The lavatory facilities at Trisha’s bar, that glorious survivor of old Soho, adorned with photos of Al Capone and the pope, bear a legend written at eye level: ‘USE AS URINAL ONLY. NO SITTING.’ Except someone – I believe they are known usually as a ‘wag’ – has inserted an H into the final word, rendering it an equally familiar (and, arguably, more appropriate) piece of Anglo-Saxon. Or ought that to be Proto-Indo-European? As John McWhorter
I have five filing cabinets. They stand in a bank against one wall of my office, mute relics of a frantic period in the evolution of information storage and retrieval and, as Craig Robertson argues in this imaginatively conceived study, of understanding what information was. They are also symbolic of my own attempts to achieve […]
Along with the tireless US-based Dutch scholar Cas Mudde, Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller is one of the most notable Western voices on the subject of populism. His main contribution has been to question dubious claims by populists to be speaking on behalf of real people. More often than not, populists are elite ‘outs’ seeking […]
As the title suggests, this is a book with an urgent message, which the author hammers home forcefully. Dave Goulson is well known as one of Britain’s leading entomologists, a bumblebee specialist and the author of such popular works as The Garden Jungle and A Sting in the Tale. Silent Earth is a cri de […]
What is life? The question sounds simple enough, but for centuries, scientists and philosophers have struggled to find a precise answer. Carl Zimmer’s engaging and informative book surveys a wide range of suggestions across the ages. For ancient Romans, a baby’s life began with its first breath, so herbally induced abortion wasn’t considered infanticide. Christian […]
If the robots are coming, will you run to greet them or run away? Or would you prefer to do something else entirely, like sit quietly with a margarita and a good book? Besides, do we even have the time to deal with super-intelligent robots, or even a bunch of fairly stupid ones, as well […]
In 1916 Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali writer and visionary, published The Home and the World, a novel critical of nationalism at a time when Indian nationalists were beginning to intensify their struggle against the Raj. Over a century later, another great Bengali, Amartya Sen, has adapted the phrase for the title of his memoir, […]
Freud took his couch. Einstein took his violin. Brecht left with twenty-six suitcases. Marcel Duchamp shipped one large trunk filled with miniatures of his artistic creations, including the iconic porcelain urinal. ‘My whole life’s work fits into one suitcase,’ he said. These are the sorts of things, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals in The Suitcase, that […]
Water covers three quarters of the planet and fills over 90 per cent of the biosphere. Yet we fight wars over it and fear that exploitable supplies will soon be depleted. Abundance, it seems, is there to be exhausted. Given the chance, people gorge until, in effect, they burst or empty the barrel. Water conservation […]
Even as the fabled midnight hour of Indian independence passed, B R Ambedkar, the great spokesperson of the country’s hideously oppressed untouchables and the principal architect of its secular and democratic constitution, still harboured strong doubts and worries over the future of his country. For him, there was an unsolvable contradiction between the egalitarian ideals […]
Paul Kenyon’s narrative begins not in downtown Bucharest in December 1989 with the moment – quite possibly the only episode in modern Romanian history most people know – when Nicolae Ceaușescu, addressing a Communist Party rally, for the first time in his life encountered something other than unadulterated adulation and fled (though not very far) […]
Ken Burns makes immensely long documentary films about immensely large American phenomena – the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, the gloriously empty expanses of such national parks as Yosemite and Yellowstone or the yawning abyss of the Vietnam War. Ernest Hemingway, seen from a distance, would seem to belong in that outsize company. Boozy and belligerent, he embodied the American ego at its most hyper-masculine and hyperbolic, as if modelling for his own chunky bust on Mount
When Shirley Jackson died in 1965 at the age of forty-eight, she was at the height of her literary power. Her fifth novel, The Haunting of Hill House, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1960 and her short story ‘The Lottery’ was still the subject of debate and discussion, nearly twenty years after its publication in the New Yorker. Jackson commanded top advances and invitations to the most prestigious writing conferences in America, while her works
Painted by Ghirlandaio in the 1480s, the frescoes decorating the main altar of Florence’s Santa Maria Novella church ostensibly tell the stories of the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist. The decor and settings, however, are all contemporary Florence and you don’t need to look far to find portraits of notable citizens as witnesses to various scenes. In the bottom left corner
The art of biography (which Kipling called ‘higher cannibalism’) involves being remarkably picky. Even when the whole of the subject’s body is laid on the table for consumption, one biographer goes for the heart, the other for the head, a third for the guts or the feet. Few biographies offer a full-course meal because a truly comprehensive representation of any one person is almost impossible. That
When Fatima Manji visits a stately home, which is something she often does, she walks swiftly past the portraits of porcelain-skinned landowners and the European art collected by a son on the Grand Tour. She is looking for something else: a brown-skinned sitter in a portrait, say, or some Arabic or Urdu lettering. These are […]
Decades ago, I visited the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire with an art historian friend. It was a mellow October afternoon, and the mossy stones and turning trees composed themselves into an English scene as lovely as any watercolour of the early 19th century. It was only when my friend said that he sometimes […]
‘In the mountains, it is always much easier.’ These are almost the last words of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers. They are spoken by a French general after his troops have blown up the hideout of Ali La Pointe and thus ‘decapitated’ the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algiers. Neil MacMaster shows […]
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
‘I have to change’, Miles Davis once said. ‘It’s like a curse.’
@rwilliams1947 tells the story of how Davis made jazz cool.
Richard Williams - In Their Own Sweet Way
Richard Williams: In Their Own Sweet Way - 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lo...
literaryreview.co.uk
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson - review by Terry Eagleton via @Lit_Review
for the new(ish) April issue of @Lit_Review I commissioned a number of pieces, including Deborah Levy on Bowie, Rosa Lyster on creative non-fiction, @JonSavage1966 on Pulp, @mjohnharrison on Oyamada, @rwilliams1947 on Kind of Blue, @chris_power on HGarner