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

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Washington Post

Selected highlights from the May 2012 issue:

David Collard on W H Auden's cinematic endeavours
POETRY IN MOTION
'The camera's eye/Does not lie,/But it cannot show/The life within'. These lines are taken from W H Auden's verse commentary for the 1962 documentary film Runner and reflect the poet's scepticism about the most powerful medium of the century, a medium to which he contributed intermittently throughout his career. Born in 1907, Auden belonged to the generation that came of age with cinema, and for which cinema became an established part of the cultural landscape. His writings are peppered with film references, and his poetry and criticism reflect a wide-ranging if eccentric taste in movies. No other poet, apart perhaps from Cocteau, can boast such a filmography. Read more.

Timothy Brook explores the real motives of Columbus and da Gama
RAISE THE HOLY SAIL
Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama used to enjoy special status in our pantheon of heroes: Columbus for 'discovering' the continents that blocked his way to Asia, and da Gama for figuring out how to circumnavigate Africa for the same end. Both ventures ended up changing history by restructuring the networks of trade linking Europe to distant regions, and gave Europe an upper hand it had not previously enjoyed. Out of Europe's seaward escape would emerge global capitalism and the social and political arrangements some call modernity. Read more.

Anna Reid on love letters from the Gulag
LEV'S LETTERS
Immured behind an iron curtain for the whole of their sixty-year existence, the Soviet concentration camps have never been as well known in the West as their much shorter-lived Nazi equivalents. Detailed accounts first started making their way out in the Sixties, in the form of fiction - Solzhenitsyn's Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - and a handful of survivor memoirs. Though the overall numbers - how many camps were there? How many people were in them? - could only be guessed at, the on-the-ground picture, of hard labour, relentless cold and hunger, and violent guards, seemed clear. Twenty years after the Soviet Union's collapse, the numbers are fairly firm. About 18 million people passed through the Gulag (the acronym stands for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration) between the start of its great expansion in 1929 and Stalin's death in 1953, and upwards of 2.8 million, including exiles, died in it. But we are only now comprehending what was in reality a wide variety of individual Gulag experiences, dependent on when and where one was imprisoned, how well or badly one's camp was run, and most of all, on one's usefulness to the camp authorities. Read more.

Leslie Mitchell on Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die
KILLER IN THE COMMONS
Successful assassinations have not really established themselves as a regular feature of the political repertoire in England. For some, this may be a matter of regret. If, at the back of a politician's mind, there was always the thought that he or she might suddenly be called away, political life might be a little more responsive to the public mood. But for the most part English history only provides examples of incompetent, would-be assassins and conspiracies that were always exposed by someone with a tender conscience. John Bellingham, however, brought it off. On 11 May 1812, he shot the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, in the lobby of the House of Commons. Read more.

Nick Cohen on Ferdinand Mount's The New Few
THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-SOME-MORES
If you want to imagine the Prime Minister at seventy, gaze on the features of his cousin at several removes, Sir William Robert Ferdinand 'Ferdie' Mount, 3rd Baronet, of Wasing, and one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher. As so often, distant relatives look more like each other than close kin. To a disconcerting degree, Cameron and Mount share the same moonish face, the same soft skin and contented look. Read more.

Caroline Moorehead on François Bizot's Facing the Torturer
JUDGEMENT DAY IN CAMBODIA
A disturbing scene opens François Bizot's new book. A fennec, a silky and affectionate nocturnal fox from the Sahara, which has been a much loved and cosseted pet, is battered to death against a wall by the author. This juxtaposition - softness and brutality - is the theme of Facing the Torturer, Bizot's account of confronting the Khmer Rouge commander who held him prisoner for a little over two months in Cambodia, along with the way that evil lies in us all, even as it coexists with decency. Just because we are full of good intentions, Bizot argues, this never means that we cannot find ourselves caught up in criminal undertakings. Read more.

Rupert Christiansen on singing
HITTING THE HIGH NOTES
To the excessive number of trivial or adulatory books about individual singers in the catalogue, here is a bracing corrective that puts what all these performers actually do - and how they do it - into the broadest cultural and historical context. Scholarly but not academic, concise, readable and lucid even to a musical layman, it is a survey that looks beyond conventional categories and hierarchies, resisting the obvious temptation to prioritise the Western classical tradition and rejecting the common assumption that snootily puts opera singing at the top and pop singing at the bottom. I found it enormously absorbing and illuminating. Read more.

NEW FICTION

Frederic Raphael on Laurent Binet's HHhH
THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE HEYDRICH PLAN
His title, both catchy and unpronounceable, declares Laurent Binet's determination at once to grab the reader's attention and proclaim his originality. We are promised that HHhH, a German acronym for ,i>Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich ('Himmler's brain is called Heydrich'), was a quip current in Nazi Germany. Confirmed rumour has it that the title was suggested by Binet's publisher, Grasset, instead of the 'too sci-fi' Opération Anthropoïde. The diplomatic Grasset also suggested removing a long attack on Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, which won the Prix Goncourt a few years ago. Binet's account of the assassination of Heydrich duly won the Prix Goncourt for the best first novel of 2010. Read more.

Sam Leith on Michael Frayn's Skios
GREECING THE PLOT
One of the things that has always fascinated me about P G Wodehouse is what he claimed to find difficult. You might have imagined that it was polishing his sentences that took the time and effort - those wonderfully unexpected similes, the back-and-forth of the dialogue, the comic timing in the prose rhythms. Not a bit of it. That stuff he cranked out by the yard: it was the plots that he agonised over. Who remembers a P G Wodehouse novel for its plot? But there'd be no novel without one - and, crucially, the struggle is nowhere on the page. Read more.