After Martha

Paul Laity

Itwas immediately clear when Martha, my 13-year-old daughter, died of septic shock that serious errors had been made. She died at Great Ormond Street Hospital, where a last-ditch attempt to save her proved futile, but the mistakes were made at King’s College Hospital in South London, where she had been treated over the previous five weeks. Before my wife, Merope, and I left Great...

 

Brian v. Eno

Ian Penman

Onemorning in early spring, I dreamed about Brian Eno’s head. It was night-time in a deserted garden centre. At the entrance a sign proclaimed: ‘Twenty Thousand Brian Enos!’ Row upon row, little plant-pot bulbs of his smiling face, pegged out to the horizon. There was transparent sheeting as a guard against the frost, played about by a shimmer of soft artificial lights....

Diary

Two Cultures of Denunciation

Sheila Fitzpatrick

Idon’tthink I ever dobbed anybody in – or if I did, I would have told myself I was doing something else. Dobbing is the preferred Australian word for denunciation or snitching to the bosses, and it is taken to be a shameful betrayal of one’s fellow subalterns. I’m quite sure that, as a child, I never sneaked to a teacher about other girls: that would have been...

From the blog

Labour’s Problems

James Butler

17 September 2025

Keir Starmer is in trouble. ‘Phase two’ of his government launched on 1 September and was immediately derailed by Angela Rayner’s tax dodging and resignation as deputy leader. Then Peter Mandelson’s long-enduring friendship with the deceased American sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein blew up in the government’s face. The denials are unconvincing. 

Short Cuts

Reform’s Disaster Capitalism

Peter Geoghegan

Reform UK​ held its first conference in October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to...

 

Gertrude Stein makes it plain

Adam Thirlwell

Ilove​ Gertrude Stein but I find it very difficult to think about the way I love her, to be precise about what’s so charming and also valuable in her writing, because everywhere you look there is her image and it can monopolise the attention. Not that I don’t love her image too. The problem is in working out what’s important, the image or the work or the way of living...

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Sargent in London

Abigail Green

There are​ few pictures of rich Jews as enchanting as Renoir’s 1881 portrait of the young Cahen d’Anvers sisters, Elisabeth and Alice, with their chubby cheeks, pearly teeth, sturdy legs and frilly dresses. Or take Ingres’s earlier but equally celebrated portrayal of the Baronne de Rothschild, a woman Heinrich Heine compared to an angel. It is at once lush and restrained....

 

Pre-MAGA

William Davies

Thesociologist Monika Krause, in her book Model Cases (2021), shows that social scientists have tended to base their concepts and theories on a surprisingly limited range of shared empirical instances. Images of the modern metropolis, for example, have been excessively shaped by studies of Chicago and Berlin. Political theories of populism have been heavily indebted to cases in Latin...

 

Mysteries of the Pearl Manuscript

Tom Johnson

At two o’clock​ in the morning on 23 October 1731, ‘a great smoak’ began to pour from the rafters of Ashburnham House in Westminster. The library was on fire, which meant that English history was on fire. Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript...

 

Tony Benn’s Beliefs

Andy Beckett

Whenever Britain​ is about to bomb another country, or is openly considering it, an old video will start doing the rounds on social media. It’s a clip a couple of minutes long from a speech by Tony Benn in the House of Commons in 1998, back in the distant days of New Labour, of which he was a frequent critic. Tony Blair’s government was seeking parliamentary approval to...

 

Ben Pester’s Surreal Scrutiny

Emily Berry

The Expansion Project​ is Ben Pester’s first novel. There is little about its opening that hints at the weirdness of the imagination which created it, though a reader familiar with Pester’s short stories may have some suspicions. The title story of Am I in the Right Place? (2020) features a ‘Mondelux single-man-in-a-bedsit oven with rotisserie setting’ that turns out...

 

On Rachel Ruysch

Clare Bucknell

Three of​ Rachel Ruysch’s paintings feature pineapples. In Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (c.1735), the fruit is hidden in a chaotic mass of stems and blooms, easy to miss behind an immense white flower head. In A Still Life with Devil’s Trumpet Flowers, Peonies, Hibiscus, Passion Flowers and Other Plants in a Brown Stoneware Vase (1700), you can see it clearly in...

Close Readings 2025

On the Close Readings podcast, longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. Catch up on our four series running in 2025: Conversations in Philosophy, Fiction and the Fantastic, Love and Death, and Novel Approaches. New episodes are released every Monday.

Read more about Close Readings 2025

LRB 45s

Were marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a limited edition series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, drawing on our rich archive of poems.

Volume 1 contains ‘Byron at Sixty-Five’, a typically inventive and witty dramatic monologue by Edwin Morgan; ‘Requiem for Mohammad al-Dura’, an elegy by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish; and ‘To 2040’, the title poem from Jorie Graham’s latest collection.

Read more about LRB 45s
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