Leslie Mitchell
Homo Economics
Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life
By Nicholas Phillipson
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 346pp £25 order from our bookshop
For some the process of dying offers a welcome opportunity to obliterate the past. Adam Smith insisted that all his private papers should be destroyed, and personally supervised the conflagration that consumed them. It was his dearest wish that he should be known exclusively from what he had left behind on the printed page.
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
According to The Spectator, 'Emily Brontë’s novel was "coarse and disagreeable". Nowadays such qualities would be enough to earn Emily and her sisters a column – Parsonage Life perhaps.'
@michaelwhite on The Spec's turbulent history.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-magazine-or-a-cocktail-party
To aefintyr and beyond… I've reviewed Stephen Taylor's wonderful Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail 1740–1840 for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/come-hell-high-water.
June is here, and so is the new issue of Literary Review.
In this month's cover article, Alexander Watson looks at revolutions in Germany and Russia, and asks why the year 1918 was such an 'extraordinary historical moment'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/aflame-with-anarchy