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.

While Shakespeare seems to maintain the status of perennial contemporary, Milton does not enjoy quite the same standing. The knotty theological wrangling and offensively strict gender hierarchies of Paradise Lost, not to mention the obtrusive and rebarbative personality of its author, make it an ever-harder sell.Is Milton’s 10,565-line poem …

Wolfgang Münchau has, for more than thirty years, been one of the most acute and penetrating commentators on the European Union, writing in the Financial Times, the New Statesman and elsewhere. What I mean to say by that, of course, is that I have often found him supporting my own views and prejudices in language rather more persuasive than I could conjure up.

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 ...

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 …

In the Current Issue: Ritchie Robertson on W G Sebald * Francis Beckett on miners * Theo Zenou on the Pope * John Adamson on the Civil War * Norma Clarke on pink * Nicholas Rankin on Norman Lewis * Michael Burleigh on Huawei * Robert Gerwarth on the Kaiser's collaboration * Pratinav Anil on missionaries and Mughals * Bijan Omrani on Mesopotamia * Miranda Seymour on the Romanovs * Jason Burke ...

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Anne Perkins: Driven to Distraction - Precipice by Robert Harris. One of the most anguished documents in Violet Asquith’s papers at the Bodleian Library is a note on a small card in the hand of her father, H H Asquith, the prime minister.

In 1789, as the revolution tore French society apart, a unique book was published in Britain. It consisted mainly of letters written by a Hampshire parson to a pair of well-known naturalists. These letters were filled with observations relating to …

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’).