For People Who Devour Books

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April 2026

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

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in central London.

April 2026, Issue 550 Piers Brendon on Jan Morris * Richard Norton-Taylor on the Cambridge Five * Jane O’Grady on Wittgenstein * Wendy Holden on royal fashion * Martin Vander Weyer on Patrick Radden Keefe * Jeremy Treglown on Shakespeare in translation * Thomas W Hodgkinson on lesser-known siblings * Philip Parker on Offa * Simon Nixon on ransomware * Peter Davidson on nocturnes * Robert Eaglestone on silence * Ian Thomson on J G Ballard * Colin MacCabe on James Joyce * Sophie Oliver on Dorothea Tanning * Stephen Smith on Alain Delon * William Whyte on places of worship * Alexander Lee on guns * Barney Ronay on Gianluigi Buffon * Nic Liney on white nationalists * Rose George on the deep sea * Patrick Galbraith on Britain’s footpaths * Keith Miller on Deborah Levy * Leo Robson on Ben Lerner * John-Baptiste Oduor on Gwendoline Riley * Felix Taylor on the Golden Dawn * and much, much more…

Piers Brendon

Jan Morris: A Life

By Sara Wheeler

The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed himself in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta and Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, and went on to evoke the character of places far and near in vivid prose, turning each odyssey into a personal ... read more

Richard Norton-Taylor

Stalin’s Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire

By Antonia Senior

It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles makes clear, such is not the case. Most of the books on what the KGB later called their ‘Magnificent Five’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross – have dwelt ... read more

Jane O'Grady

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes

By Anthony Gottlieb

I Think of You Constantly with Love: The Letters of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ben Richards

By Gabriel Citron & Alfred Schmidt (edd)

‘The research laboratory for world destruction’ was what, in 1914, the journalist Karl Kraus presciently called Vienna. At various times in the early 20th century, its inhabitants included Adolf Hitler, Theodor ... read more

Martin Vander Weyer

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth

By Patrick Radden Keefe

The New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden Keefe is best known in his native land for Empire of Pain (2021), an exposé of the Sackler dynasty and the role of their drug company Purdue Pharma in the opioid crisis. On this side of the Atlantic he has also been widely saluted for Say Nothing (2018), a history of the conflict in Northern Ireland as epitomised by the murder of ... read more

Wendy Holden

Fashioning the Crown: A Story of Power, Conflict and Couture

By Justine Picardie

Dressing the Queen: Two Hundred Years of Makers and Monarchy

By Kate Strasdin

Fashioning the Crown, Justine Picardie’s part-history, part-critique of 20th-century royal dressing, has emerged at a difficult time for the monarchy. And not just because of Mr Mountbatten-Windsor. Another royal crisis is the lack of a central leading lady ... read more

Jeremy Treglown

If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation

By Daniel Hahn

When the American academic, poet and translator Robert Fagles went on tour with his Odyssey, it was said that there were people in the audience who believed he actually was Homer. He was too modest to fall victim to that illusion and anyway not a one-author translator, having already produced versions of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Before his death in 2008, he ... read more

Simon Nixon

We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware

By Anja Shortland

Not so long ago, stories about powerful computer viruses apparently spreading around the world and threatening to bring modern life to a halt regularly filled the news. These days, cybercrime rarely makes the headlines, and most of us have become inured to warnings that our passwords have been found in a data leak. Yet ... read more

Thomas W Hodgkinson

Relative Failures: The Lives of Willie Wilde, Mabel Beardsley and Howard Sturgis

By Matthew Sturgis

Some while back, the literary biography industry slowed as it began to run out of subjects to write about. It found a new avenue in studies of the wives of writers. Since then, it has broadened out into parents. Now Matthew Sturgis further extends the remit to brothers and sisters with this beguiling biographical triptych ... read more