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 ...

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 …

Does anything ever truly happen in the Messiah? This extraordinarily popular tripartite choral work, first performed in Dublin in 1742, consists almost entirely of saying rather than of doing. Circling around the redemptive power of Christ, it combines declarations with …

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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.

Reading art history can be like watching paint dry: X studied under the distinguished Professor Y at the Académie de ZZZ. Scandal can pique the reader’s interest – the numberless offspring, the surreptitious machinations to support the artist’s prices. But the details are now likely to be ...

In 1789, as the revolution tore French society apart, a unique book was published in Britain. It consisted mainly of letters written by a Hampshire parson to a pair of well-known naturalists. These letters were filled with observations relating to …

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and her autofictional novel The Bell Jar – that it almost seems to undermine her canonical status.In reality, of course, it does no such thing.

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 on Saudi Arabia * David ...

Paul Theroux is the author of more than fifty books. Thirty-three of them have been novels – and this is the thirty-fourth. While assiduous and always interesting as a novelist, he is probably better known for his travel books, some of which have been bestsellers.