Literary Review | For People Who Devour Books
2 days ago · In the Current Issue: Howard Davies on Bernard Mandeville * Claire Harman on Emily Dickinson * Stephen Smith on Piet Mondrian * Colin Jones on fools * Thomas Hodgkinson on Hollywood flops * Dennis Duncan on blank pages * Peter Davidson on Henry Fuseli * Deirdre McCloskey on Ayn Rand * Richard Davenport-Hines on Clarissa Eden * Peter Marshall on monasteries * Laura Ashe on medieval women ...
December 2024/January 2025 Crime Round-up
Natasha Cooper: December 2024/January 2025 Crime Round-up - The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer; The Killing Sense by Sam Blake; The Broken River by Chris Hammer; A Serpent in the Garden by Howard Linskey; The Last Truths We Told by Holly Watt; The Troubled Deep by Rob Parker; Murder Mindfully by Karsten Dusse (Translated from German by Florian Duijsens); The Bookseller by Tim Sullivan
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller - review by Stevie Davies
Andrew Miller’s moving new novel is set in the ‘Big Freeze’ of 1962–3, Britain’s coldest winter since 1739. From December through to February, there was no let-up. Snowdrifts formed walls that were metres high; rivers and lakes froze; transport ground to a …
Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm
‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first visit to Winston Churchill’s country house at Chartwell in Kent. He described the house ...
About - Literary Review
2 days ago · About. Literary Review covers all the latest books each month, ranging from history and biography to memoir and fiction.Each issue contains sixty-four pages of reviews from some of the leading authors, journalists, academics and thinkers in Britain in a variety of fields. It aims to reach a wide audience of readers who enjoy intelligent and accessible writing.
Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway - review by D D Guttenplan
D D Guttenplan: Smiley Redux - Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway. In May 1966, an aggrieved John le Carré wrote to the editor of the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta in response to a critical review.Noting that his books were at that point unavailable in the Soviet Union, he set out his stall for the benefit of (sadly imaginary) Russian …
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed)
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and her autofictional novel The Bell Jar – that it almost seems to undermine her canonical status.In reality, of course, it does no such thing.
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe - review by Jeremy …
Jonathan Coe’s latest book turns out to be a bag of tricks, but it starts sedately enough. Phyl, a recent English graduate, is back living with her parents, Joanna and Andrew, making puns about ‘parochial’ vicars and contemplating writing a cosy crime novel (‘It would be like writing a student essay: all you had to do was to make sure that you … followed the agreed formula’).
On James Baldwin’s centenary - review by Douglas Field
The 2001 teen film Save the Last Dance – an underwhelming story about a white ballet dancer in Chicago’s South Side – contains a surprisingly useful commentary on the legacy of the writer James Baldwin. In one scene, a high school teacher introduces the lead character, Sara, and her class to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.He calls it a …
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng - review by Tom Williams
T ensions between the public and the private lie at the heart of Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, a novel predominantly set in Penang in 1921 and immersed in the social mores of the British Empire.Lesley Hamlyn is married to Robert, a barrister eighteen years her senior. Theirs is a polite, passionless marriage, burdened but also sustained by deep silences and long-stored secrets, the two ...