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 February issue:

John Gray
KOESTLER - LIFE OF A GIANT
'I was born at the moment when the sun was setting on the Age of Reason.' Appearing at the start of Arrow in the Blue, one of the memoirs that were his most lasting achievement, this judgement could have been made by any number of Arthur Koestler's contemporaries... Read more.

Claire Harman
THE BELLE OF AMHERST?
Posterity hasn't had much trouble knowing what to do with Emily Dickinson; it has revered her as a poet and sentimentalised her life. The reclusive spinster published fewer than a dozen of almost 2,000 poems she had stashed in her room and after her death it was easy to mythologise her as an unworldly, unrecognised genius, an image that persisted right up to and beyond the 1976 stage show The Belle of Amherst...Read more.

Michael Burleigh
WHO'S GOT THE BOMB?
Like a certain type of liberal, patrician British newspaper columnist, Professor John Mueller specialises in allaying fears deliberately sown among the credulous mob by sundry alarmists and doom-mongers with a professional interest in worst-case scenarios...Read more.

Piers Brendon
WHAT WINSTON REALLY WANTED
In 1957 Sir Winston Churchill, who had visited east Africa fifty years earlier as a junior minister in the Colonial Office, provided a short prologue to a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film about the Mau Mau revolt entitled Something of Value, starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier...Read more.

D J Taylor
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH
Last May I took my sixteen-year-old son to see Martin Amis 'in conversation' with Robert McCrum at the Norwich Playhouse. Amis came on late and left early, declined to speak on the topic advertised ('The writer and freedom'), nodded a weary head to all of three questions and later granted a disobliging interview to the local paper about the minimal bar facilities available on the train home... Read more.