Britain's best loved literary magazine, now in its 30th year
Reviews of new books in history, politics, travel, biography and fiction
Contributors who are irreverent, accomplished and amusing

"In Literary Review you find something that has almost vanished from the book pages: its contributors are actually interested in Literature."
Martin Amis

"This magazine is flush with tight, smart writing."
Washington Post

Selected highlights from the July issue:

Sudhir Hazareesingh on Charles de Gaulle
MELANCHOLIC PROPHET
'Last year, during a visit to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, I was interviewed by Nick Miller, health correspondent at the Melbourne Age newspaper. I had recently co-authored a book about alternative medicine entitled Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, so we spoke for an hour, after which Nick set about writing up our discussion. Of course, before Nick could publish the interview, he passed it by the in-house lawyer, who proceeded to gut the article to such an extent that my strongest views about homeopathy were removed.' Read more.

Interview with Margaret Atwood
WRITING IN A DIGITAL AGE
The Booker Prize-winning Canadian author and 'dogged blogger and Tweeter' talks to Rosalind Porter about a writer's response to the onset of the digital era. Read more.

Jonathan Mirsky on China's Environmental Disaster
WHEN A BILLION CHINESE JUMP
'Only last year, Thomas Friedman, three-times Pulitzer Prize winner and a regular columnist in the New York Times, wrote: 'One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages ... It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.' A year earlier, Friedman wished that 'we could be like China for a day' so that the US could really get things done on saving the environment... ' Read more.

Frederic Raphael revisits the Dreyfus Affair
AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER
'Horace was right, 'Bis repetita placent': people like to hear the same stories all over again. Why else should Ruth Harris add yet another volume to the fat library of material, ancient and modern, on the Dreyfus Affair? Her justification has to be either that she has new evidence or that her style will refresh the topic. Only a crackpot, counter-factual version of the Affair could argue that Dreyfus really was guilty and that the 'Jewish lobby', in a proto-typical form, perverted the course of justice...' Read more.

David Lewis-Williams on Cave Paintings
SCRATCHING THE SURFACE
'Some 15,000 years ago, in what is now the Dordogne region of France, someone - man or woman, we don't know - crawled hundreds of metres through a dark underground passage no more than one metre high. Then he or she scratched a few lines on a bulge of rock. Suddenly, the rock was transformed: an image of a horse appeared. No one else could witness the appearance of the animal: only one person at a time could fit into the confined space. Then he or she retreated back down the passage to the world of light...' Read more.

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