In the Current Issue: Ritchie Robertson on W G Sebald * Francis Beckett on miners * Theo Zenou on the Pope * John Adamson on the Civil War * Norma Clarke on pink * Nicholas Rankin on Norman Lewis * Michael Burleigh on Huawei * Robert Gerwarth on the Kaiser's collaboration * Pratinav Anil on missionaries and Mughals * Bijan Omrani on Mesopotamia * Miranda Seymour on the Romanovs * Jason Burke ...

D D Guttenplan: Smiley Redux - Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway. In May 1966, an aggrieved John le Carré wrote to the editor of the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta in response to a critical review.Noting that his books were at that point unavailable in the Soviet Union, he set out his stall for the benefit of (sadly imaginary) Russian …

In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People, he was humiliated by two famous men of …

‘It’s not a bad life for the leaders of the British bourgeoisie! There’s plenty for them to protect in their capitalist system!’ So wrote Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, after his first visit to Winston Churchill’s country house at Chartwell in Kent. He described the house ...

While Shakespeare seems to maintain the status of perennial contemporary, Milton does not enjoy quite the same standing. The knotty theological wrangling and offensively strict gender hierarchies of Paradise Lost, not to mention the obtrusive and rebarbative personality of its author, make it an ever-harder sell.Is Milton’s 10,565-line poem …

About. Literary Review covers all the latest books each month, ranging from history and biography to memoir and fiction.Each issue contains sixty-four pages of reviews from some of the leading authors, journalists, academics and thinkers in Britain in a variety of fields. It aims to reach a wide audience of readers who enjoy intelligent and accessible writing.

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Jonathan Coe’s latest book turns out to be a bag of tricks, but it starts sedately enough. Phyl, a recent English graduate, is back living with her parents, Joanna and Andrew, making puns about ‘parochial’ vicars and contemplating writing a cosy crime novel (‘It would be like writing a student essay: all you had to do was to make sure that you … followed the agreed formula’).

T ensions between the public and the private lie at the heart of Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, a novel predominantly set in Penang in 1921 and immersed in the social mores of the British Empire.Lesley Hamlyn is married to Robert, a barrister eighteen years her senior. Theirs is a polite, passionless marriage, burdened but also sustained by deep silences and long-stored secrets, the two ...

Andrew Miller’s moving new novel is set in the ‘Big Freeze’ of 1962–3, Britain’s coldest winter since 1739. From December through to February, there was no let-up. Snowdrifts formed walls that were metres high; rivers and lakes froze; transport ground to a …