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 …

In the Current Issue: Howard Davies on Bernard Mandeville * Claire Harman on Emily Dickinson * Stephen Smith on Piet Mondrian * Colin Jones on fools * Thomas Hodgkinson on Hollywood …

The arrival of each new David Hepworth book is not unlike the release of the albums about which he writes with such precision and rigour. Hotly anticipated by the nostalgic ageing and the …

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 …

At the age of thirty-seven William Morris went off to Iceland to reassess his life (or lives) to date. From a sunny, well-heeled childhood – his father was a bill broker who died shortly and luckily …

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 …

Fresh discoveries for even the most avid reader. Subscribe to Literary Review today and enjoy: Eleven illustrated issues per year, delivered to your letterbox Bumper double issue for …

Howard Davies on Bernard Mandeville * Claire Harman on Emily Dickinson * Stephen Smith on Piet Mondrian * Colin Jones on fools * Thomas Hodgkinson on Hollywood flops * Dennis …

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 …

Ali Smith looks at a sentence the way a mechanic looks at an old car engine. She takes her wrench and deconstructs an unsuspecting word into its constituent parts, swaps one element …