Since Goethe lived to be eighty-two, his life provides an almost unmanageable amount of material for the biographer. Matthew Bell cuts a path through this forest by offering an intellectual biography.

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. Though Jean-Michel Basquiat was a sensation in his lifetime, ...

What do we think of when we think of blondes? Perhaps Scandinavia, where blonde hair is commonplace, or iconic blonde stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. Sexy Swedes, brash Americans or ...

In his early thirties, Merlin Holland went to the launch of an anthology of work by Rebecca West at Searcys restaurant in London. There, a certain actress took it upon herself to introduce him to the ...

When, in a classic scene in probably the smartest cartoon series in history, the notoriously idiotic Homer Simpson says, ‘everyone is stupid except me’, the joke is as much on us as it is on him. At ...

Longstanding readers of Literary Review.might recall the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul. In 2003, after an argument with its manager, my late friend and co-author of a guide to Afghanistan, Matthew ...

Is it possible to say anything new about the French Revolution? Perhaps not, unless fresh sources come to light. Whether it might be possible to say something that has been so long forgotten that it ...

Christopher Marlowe is having a moment. In London’s West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company is staging Born with Teeth, a new play by Liz Duffy Adams that imagines the erotic tension crackling between ...

‘What’s wrong with being sentimental?’ Paul McCartney once asked an interviewer. Ferdinand Mount pretends that he was shocked. Here was a songwriter who has been acclaimed as one of the greatest since ...

The most reticent and troubled member of the so-called New York School of Poets, James Schuyler (1923–91) gave his first poetry reading in November 1988, at the advanced age of sixty-five. The queue ...

Those who go in search of plants have long been a resilient breed. On the evidence of the startling opening of her extensively researched yet elegantly written first book, Harriet Rix is no exception.

Some anniversaries catch the public imagination more than others. Few, I suspect, will instantly recall that 2025 marks four hundred years since the death of James VI and I. He had the misfortune of ...