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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.

Issue 548 Norma Clarke on Charlie Chaplin’s London * Richard Bourke on revolution * Lucasta Miller on George Sand * Peter Davidson on Constable * Philippe Marlière on far-right France * Munro Price on the Marquis de Morès * Piers Brendon on Trotsky’s demise * Mark Glancy on Hitchcock’s scores * Felicity Brown on romantic fiction * Simon Nixon on money laundering * Will Wiles on pinball * Joe Moran on the Footlights * Andrew Preston on Robert McNamara * Fitzroy Morrissey on the last Ottoman caliph * Hermione Eyre on Jessica Mitford * Michael Burleigh on MAGA * Freya Johnston on Daniel Defoe * Alexander Lee on Henry Wotton * Kapil Komireddi on Buddhist extremism * Miranda Seymour on Russian forests * Zoe Guttenplan on George Saunders * Ben Hutchinson on Gabriele Tergit * Peter Kemp on Julian Barnes * Joseph Williams on Madeline Cash * and much, much more…

Norma Clarke

Hard Streets: Working-Class Lives in Charlie Chaplin’s London

By Jacqueline Riding

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) gets top billing in the subtitle of Hard Streets but he’s not the star of the show. The book begins with and is built around an earlier rags-to-riches tale and its wider purpose is to make us look closer at the rags and be less beguiled by the riches. George Tinworth (1843–1913) – of whom, the author admits, few people will have heard – was born and grew up in the same Walworth neighbourhood where Chaplin’s mother, Hannah, was born in 1865 and where Charlie himself entered the world. Desperate ... read more

Richard Bourke

The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin

By Dan Edelstein

Revolutions: A New History

By Donald Sassoon

The word ‘revolution’ enjoys a special place in our political vocabulary. It is associated with events that shaped the modern world – the English Revolution of the mid-17th century, the French Revolution of of 1789, the revolutions of ... read more

Lucasta Miller

Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand

By Fiona Sampson

‘Self-called George Sand,’ as Elizabeth Barrett Browning termed her, was a phenomenon in her own time and remains so in the cultural memory. She bestrides the Paris of the 1830s in the collective imagination, puffing on a cigar and dressed in men’s clothes, but with a cinched waist (if we are to believe Gavarni’s famous illustration) that seems to emphasise her ... read more

Peter Davidson

Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons

By Susan Owens

Whenever I visit the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, I gravitate to one rapid, brilliant depiction of the sky over Hampstead on the first of October, 1822 in which John Constable catches the dark clouds beginning to shadow the bright cumulus at the close of an autumn day. Constable’s sky study is at once virtuosic in fixing a moment in the clouds and poignant in the evanescence of ... read more

Philippe Marlière

Far-Right France: Le Pen, Bardella and the Future of Europe

By Victor Mallet

Soon, the French far Right will come to power for the first time since the end of the Second World War. This is the thesis stated bluntly by Victor Mallet, a journalist with the Financial Times and Reuters, at the beginning of his new book. Given current polls and recent election results, we have to take seriously the prospect of a victory for the Rassemblement National ... read more

Munro Price

The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès

By Sergio Luzzatto

On 3 June 1896, a caravan consisting of an interpreter, a few black servants and one European, escorted by Berber guides, set up camp near the remote oasis of El Ouatia in the Tunisian desert. The European was the Marquis de Morès – explorer, adventurer and far-right demagogue – who aimed to forestall British influence in the region by opening up a route for French trade and ... read more

Piers Brendon

The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy

By Josh Ireland

Ever since the Russian Revolution, with a brief hiatus during the Gorbachev era, the Kremlin has practised murder as a matter of state policy. Lenin, who survived several attempts on his own life, quickly established the Cheka (subsequently GPU, NKVD, KGB and today FSB), which was empowered to act as ‘policeman, investigator ... read more