Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling

Oneway of thinking about fascism is to see it as historically specific: a reactionary mass movement produced by the economic and social chaos that engulfed Europe after the First World War. Fascism promised national rebirth through the violent cleansing of enemies at home and conquest abroad; to achieve this required public consent to the undoing of democracy. Where fascism took root, it...

 

Defence Tech

Laleh Khalili

You may remember​ Palantir as the company that was given access to all of NHS England’s data in November 2023, in order to create a Federated Data Platform. The cost was £330 million – the largest NHS technology contract to date. Palantir’s first sales pitch to a UK agency came much earlier, in 2008, when its representatives gave a demo to an enthusiastic audience at...

 

Travels with Norman Lewis

Neal Ascherson

Norman Lewis​ wrote about himself that ‘travel came before writing. There was a time when I felt that all I wanted from life was to be allowed to remain a perpetual spectator of changing scenes.’ Luckily for us, his broadening skill as a writer caught up with his lust for those ‘changing scenes’. He became a novelist, a great reporter – one of the most effective...

 

Leopold’s Legacy

Jeremy Harding

An hour​ into the galleries of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, you come to Tonga, a startling piece by Nada Tshibwabwa, a Congolese artist and musician. It’s made from recycled mobile phone waste and is roughly the size of a ceremonial mask designed to fit a human head. Tshibwabwa was an artist in residence at the museum in 2022 and his work is now part of...

 

On Marguerite Yourcenar

Joanna Biggs

Awriter​ ‘with whom I feel no affinity’: that’s how Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, described Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française. When the 77-year-old Yourcenar entered the Académie on 22 January 1981, wearing a black velvet double-layer cape designed by Yves Saint...

From the blog

In Gaza Nothing’s Impossible

Selma Dabbagh

3 June 2025

Malak Mattar’s monumental 2024 black-and-white painting inspired by Guernica is entitled No Words (… for Gaza). A photographer told me he has aerial images taken in May 2023, October 2023 and May 2025 which say it all. Some things are incommunicable through words. But words are all that some of us have.  

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Peter Brown’s Achievement

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Historians​ make themselves useful by organising thoughts about the past, hacking it into conceptual chunks, some of which take their place in a framework of historical cliché. Most people in Western cultures are comfortable with the terms ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘medieval’ as points of reference, regardless of the way the shifting frontiers of historical research...

 

Refusenik DPs

Susan Pedersen

The​ Second World War is often described as a total war – that is, a war which blurred the divide between front and home front, colony and metropole, women and men, soldier and civilian. But if we shift our attention from Dunkirk and Normandy eastwards – to the war Germany unleashed against Poland and then, from 1941, the Soviet Union – total war seems an understatement....

 

Murder Most Delicious

Dinah Birch

‘We never say what we mean, and you’ll never know what we’re thinking. And by the time you work it out, someone is murdering you with a bow and arrow at an antique fair. That’s just how we are I’m afraid.’ This is an arch piece of marketing from Richard Osman, promoting his detective novels to an American readership. There’s no reason to suppose that...

Diary

Rape Crisis Centres

Lili Owen Rowlands

When​ I trained as a volunteer for a rape crisis helpline in 2017, I was taught to allow three rings before picking up. This gives the caller time to ready themselves: answer more quickly and they might feel startled; leave it too long and the gap can feel like abandonment. There are no rules about what constitutes a crisis. Calls can be about an assault that took place days earlier or an...

Short Cuts

University Finances

Ed Kiely

On 12 May​, ten days after Reform swept the local elections, Keir Starmer launched a white paper with the title ‘Restoring Control over the Immigration System’. The timing was a coincidence, he said: ‘People who like politics will try to make this all about politics,’ but ‘it is what I believe in.’ Among other measures – fewer visas for skilled...

 

Siege Art

Hal Foster

When a man​ tips his hat on the street, we take it as a friendly greeting. That’s what it means to read visual signs ‘iconographically’, Erwin Panofsky writes in his classic essay ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’, from 1939 (when men still wore hats and some were friendly). The tipping of the hat, he speculates, began...

At the National Gallery

Painting in Siena

Erin Maglaque

In​ 1345, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a monumental mappa mundi for the wall of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. At the axis of its rotating concentric wheels was the little city. For painters, Siena was the centre of the world. Dozens and dozens of them lived elbow-to-elbow in a couple of tiny parishes in the commune. They rendered tempera landscapes with pigments cooked from Sienese dirt. The...

 

‘Enlightenment Biopolitics’

David Todd

France​ doesn’t do race. Article 1 of the French constitution asserts ‘the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion’. In 1978 a law banned the collection and use of personal data based on ‘the alleged racial origin or the ethnic origin’ of individuals. Breaching the ban is a criminal offence, inviting a fine of up...

From the archive

The Case of Agatha Christie

John Lanchester

She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate. Her plots are complicated, designedly so, and the backstories and red herrings involved are often ornate, but in the end, the reason one person murders another in her work comes down to avarice and/or hate. She believed in evil, not necessarily in a theological sense – that’s a topic she doesn’t explore – but as a plain fact about human beings and their actions.

Close Readings: New for 2025

Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription in which longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. Discover the four new series for 2025 (with new episodes released every Monday): Conversations in Philosophy, Fiction and the Fantastic, Love and Death and Novel Approaches. 

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Partner Events, Spring-Summer 2025

Check back for seasonal announcements, including three events at the Hay Festival 2025 and a new screening series at the Garden Cinema.

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