Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of...
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In one interview, he cited my version of it: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.
At the beginning of January, in the bookshop of Terminal 2 at San Francisco airport, I looked for a translation of the Iliad not that I really expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction; and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back.
The Iliad is a million miles away from the pornography of violence offered by many lesser war books, battle paintings, martial sculptures and most obviously films, in which the enemy bad guys are triumphantly trampled or gleefully mown down, because the humanity of the victims, their terror and their atrocious pain, are fully expressed.
With hindsight what is most shocking about Joe Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on 27 June 2024 is not how old Biden seemed but that he managed to make Trump appear relatively young. Trump was at that point the second oldest presidential candidate in American history – second only to Biden – yet Biden’s intermittently ashen, waxen, leaden, frozen performance had the...
We don’t have a politics of what works so much as a politics of what older citizens won’t notice. All human beings are risk-averse but we get more risk-averse as we get older. Now that older people have much more to lose, retooling politics for a rapidly changing world is getting harder all the time. That’s the prognosis. What’s the cure?
The first thing you see at Virgil Ortiz’s exhibition Continuum: Blindfall, First Strike, at the Vladem Contemporary branch of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe (until 18 October), is a monumental head on a pedestal. The head has a band of black across the eyes, a row of five topknots marching from forehead to nape, and a pattern of spikes on a looped line across the hairless...
In 1848, the US seized the northern half of Mexico, from California to New Mexico, and imposed American law and the English language – a reminder that most of what is now the United States of America was not part of it in 1776, and would not be for many decades.
‘Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?’ Albert Einstein’s question, quoted in the New York Times in 1944, acknowledges the great mystery of his celebrity. He was a popular, instantly recognisable figure during his lifetime, and has remained so more than seventy years after his death. Yet the theory of relativity, the work for which he is best known, is...
‘Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?’ Albert Einstein’s question acknowledges the great mystery of his celebrity. He was a popular, instantly recognisable figure during his lifetime, and has remained so more than seventy years after his death. Yet the theory of relativity is still, more than a hundred years after its formulation, beyond the grasp of all but a tiny minority.
Emily Wilson, who has translated both The Odyssey and The Iliad, joins Thomas Jones to talk through Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation. As Wilson argues, while Homer’s Odyssey might seem the perfect source material for Nolan, the ancient Greek poem excels at many things the director isn’t so good at, not least dialogue and characterisation.
Some books can be judged by their covers, others by their titles. The American edition of Peter Jones’s Self-Help from the Middle Ages is subtitled ‘What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living’. At some point, the British publisher changed it to the anodyne ‘A Journey into the Medieval Mind’. Did they think the seven deadly sins sounded too depressing...
Self-Help from the Middle Ages raises some provocative questions about historical figures. Was Thomas Aquinas truly a glutton, or was he so absorbed in thought that he ate whatever was set before him, without noticing how much? Did Catherine of Siena really think of her notorious (and fatal) anorexia as a ‘philosophy of wellness’?
There’s no sign over the door of Palantir’s UK headquarters, an eight-storey neoclassical building in Soho Square. The windows are lined with thick reflective glass. When we tried to take some photographs outside recently, a man with a lanyard told us to stop. He wouldn’t be drawn on his employer: ‘It’s just a tech company.’ Two independent sources who...
A decade ago Palantir was largely unknown in the UK. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government. Yet behind the company’s bombastic self-image, we found there was often a much more prosaic reality: problems with software, pressure from management, staff resistance, but also an unrivalled level of political access.
That James Joyce had a political life might seem surprising. The standard critical account is that he took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. From then on it was art that preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from...
Joyce stands out among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress and the preciousness of the everyday. If he is outrageously experimental, he is also in thrall to the mundane and disregarded. He is indebted to the wit and iconoclasm of daily life in Dublin for his humour, a quality not prominent in the work of Rilke or Pound.
In 2015, while I was researching a book on shipping, I travelled on the Corte Real from Malta to Jebel Ali. The other two passengers on board, sailing from Hamburg all the way to Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia, were German septuagenarian widows who preferred travelling by freighter to the ‘false sociality’ of cruise ships. They had brought good coffee, which they brewed at 10 a.m....
Seafaring is a bundle of contradictions. It is highly skilled labour, yet mostly invisible. Lower ratings of seafarers are housed together, six or eight to a claustrophobic cabin, yet they are chronically lonely. They may love the adventure of going to sea, but their everyday work is tedious and backbreaking. They pride themselves on their professionalism, and can’t wait to retire.
In her Clarendon Lectures, given at Oxford in 2023 and recently published as Poetry’s Nature (Oxford, £25.99), Susan Stewart recapitulates themes that have preoccupied her for half a century. ‘The Bird in Glee: On the Non-semantic’ returns to ideas she explored in her first study on poetics, Nonsense (1979). ‘The Seasons: Paradigm of Lyric Time’...
For Stewart, this is what poetic process is: the closely observed emergence of empirical knowledge out of chaos, confusion, darkness. But she is not only a theorist; she has always alternated books of poetry with books about it, allowing her practice to elucidate her abstractions.
The first Alfred Hitchcock film I can remember seeing was The Birds, when it was broadcast on BBC One on the evening of Sunday, 6 June 1971. I would have been nine years old, and it must have come as quite a revelation to me that this enigmatic but ubiquitous celebrity had a sideline in filmmaking. To me Alfred Hitchcock was many things, but not a film director. His was the name on the...
The music Bernard Herrmann wrote for The Wrong Man is diffident, sometimes almost unnoticeable. His score for Hitchcock’s next film, Vertigo, is loud, lushly romantic and Wagnerian. But in some respect, the scores are identical: both are self-effacing, in the sense that both are the work of a composer who recognises that his task is to seek out the essence of the material on screen and to express that rather than himself.
As one of the day’s first visitors to the National Gallery, I arrived at the Zurbarán exhibition just before the lights went on. Suddenly, as if in an ecstatic vision, a huge image of Christ on the Cross against a black backdrop appeared in front of me. Projecting into the gallery space, with soft and supple skin, Christ seemed almost alive. Zurbarán made the painting for...
Zurbarán has always seemed to me an engaging but second division painter. Seeing many of his paintings across all the genres together, I realised I was wrong. They are mesmerising.
The title of this book misses a trick. ‘Stay alive’ doesn’t quite get the Berlinisch black humour of the original: ‘Bleiben Sie übrig.’ That last word also hints at something left over, an unlikely survival. A scrap left on the edge of a dog’s dish goes much too far, but a blackened somebody crawling out of his ruined house after a thousand-bomber...
As a British wartime child living near secret things and sites, I can remember easily respecting the instruction: ‘Just forget you saw that!’ But years later in Germany, I learned how often young men on leave had confided hideous things they had seen to their mothers or sisters. In the last year of the war, the fear that gripped Berliners was not just of military defeat but of vengeance.
Calvin’s Case (1608) is, as one of its judges, Sir Edward Coke, put it, ‘magnum in parvo … a matter of great consequence upon a slender subject’. The case concerned whether a Scottish child could inherit property in London. King James VI of Scotland had acceded to the English throne five years earlier, and this was the first test to establish whether a Scottish...
It was relatively straightforward for the British government to end birthright subjecthood: statute overrides common law. It is less easy for those seeking to end birthright citizenship in the US, since the courts cannot overrule the constitution. For eighteen months, Trump’s executive order was subject to legal challenge. The arguments reached back to English common law and to historical interpretations of allegiance and domicile.
Narendra Modi has had his hand forced by a group of meme-making students and members of the Indian working class. It began with an insult. In . . .
The current Ebola outbreak was first reported in Ituri on 5 May. Ten days later laboratory analysis confirmed the presence of Bundibugyo virus . . .
James ‘Fergie’ Chambers, a US citizen, was detained by Spanish police on Ibiza earlier this month. He was visiting the Balearic . . .
Occasionally when the phone rang at the London Review offices in the late 1990s it would be the operator asking if we’d accept a reverse . . .
Before the final yesterday I was puzzled as to why Jennifer Hudson was singing the US national anthem: did they think we might have forgotten . . .
The masked men had hidden the identification on their olive green private security uniforms. They wore sunglasses, body cameras and a variety . . .
English identity is a funny business: we can be one thing to ourselves and something else to others, and that changes depending on mood and . . .
My friend Jawad Ali, a Palestinian American lawyer, was at his daughter’s graduation last month when he got a call from his sister in . . .
It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male protagonist embarks on a desperate quest to recover a female love object. But, as Emily Wilson argues, while Homer’s Odyssey might seem the perfect source material for Nolan, the ancient Greek poem also...
It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male...
The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin wrote recently in the LRB. The newsletter where they work, Democracy for Sale, ‘has been looking into Palantir’s business in the UK, and particularly its contracts with the NHS’. On...
The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin...
Would the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North American colonies has become the most powerful and prosperous in the world, but the muted celebrations on 4 July reflected a divided country in which, for many of its citizens, the principles of the Declaration of Independence are hard to square with...
Would the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North American colonies has become the most powerful and...
The Trump-Russia dossier, leaked to the press in 2017, contained multiple allegations of collusion between the US president and Putin, including reports of meetings between Kremlin officials and members of Trump’s campaign team, and the existence of kompromat in the form of the infamous ‘pee tape’. Shortly after the dossier was leaked, Christopher Steele, the head of a...
The Trump-Russia dossier, leaked to the press in 2017, contained multiple allegations of collusion between the US president and Putin, including reports of meetings between Kremlin officials and...
Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect the collapse of the Starmer project and the prospects for a Burnham administration, James is joined by Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times, and William Davies, a...
Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak...
‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is that a nostalgic illusion? The second competition, held in Italy in 1934, was a podium for Mussolini and, as Skinner puts it, ‘an early advertisement of the tournament’s...
‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the...
Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering the concepts of both work and play in the writing process. They then look at three poems that address workplace experiences. Valzhyna Mort’s ‘Factory of Tears’ and Robert...
Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by...
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which...
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising...
Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last week, Trump’s Board of Peace released a report complaining of a ‘funding gap’ after reports emerged that it had received only a ‘tiny fraction’ of the $17 billion its members had pledged to rebuild the region.
In this...
Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last week, Trump’s Board of Peace released a...
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every individual; in the US it’s more than $7000, and the majority of this exists in the highest-denomination banknotes, such as the $100 and €500 bills. So where is it all? Remarkably, nobody really...
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every...
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the time when computer games didn't even have screens, and in this episode he talks to Tom about the enormous changes generative AI has brought to programming and the world of work in the past couple of...
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the...
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and...
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in...
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second in Scotland (tied with Reform UK) and lost nearly 1500 councillors in England. But while Plaid Cymru and the SNP were victorious in Wales and Scotland, in many ways the results in England were a...
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession,...
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB. Last October, he set out on a road trip across America, with the aim of attending as many different kinds of criminal and civil trials as possible in one month. His journey took him from immigration...
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB....
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the...
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom...
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s Leo XIV has, but he may as well have done in his angry response to the American pope’s criticism of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran. With the US president’s supporters invoking the...
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s...
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River a ‘Hizbullah kill zone’.
In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in...
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’.
In...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest...
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that its cause began to be understood, as scientists conducted experiments on dogs. It was a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto in the early 1920s who – through a gruelling series...
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century...
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us angrier and filling billionaire-owned social media sites with monetisable content? Sarah Stein Lubrano has argued that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is a myth and the best ideas often...
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us...
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in the LRB, Andrew O’Hagan writes: ‘All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and “loyalty” in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Ghislaine Maxwell took this young girl to...
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in...
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election last month, the prime minister has managed to cling on, for now. His critics point to a lack of vision in government, the alienation of Labour members and a failure to accept the need for...
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton...
In a press conference on 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Earlier that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the ongoing strikes were ‘just the beginning’. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Robert Malley and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj to discuss the chaos of Trump’s Iran strategy, whether...
In a press conference on 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Earlier that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the...
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible.In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has...
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an...
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’.On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio represented his models' bodies on canvas – their muscles, skin, hair, clothing and dirty...
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this...
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under fifteen kilometres per hour. Yet postal systems, as pioneered by the enterprising Tassis family, were becoming ever more reliable and efficient, at first in northern Italy and then across much of...
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under...
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the Iraq war, the London Review of Books held a debate: ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ The panel comprised Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Jacqueline Rose, Anatol Lieven and Onora O’Neill.President Bush’s ultimatum set the tone: either you’re with us or you’re with the...
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the Iraq war, the London Review of Books held a debate: ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ The panel...
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This is among the many extraordinary details of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein revealed by the release of more than three million pages of documents by the US Justice Department last month....
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This...
In ‘The Light Eaters’ (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our ideas of plants as passive life forms. Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith explore Schlanger’s account of new research into plant behaviour. They examine the case for plant agency – and...
In ‘The Light Eaters’ (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our...
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? Seamus Perry considers the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and...
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and...
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long after that moved to the US where she became a naturalised citizen and joined the Communist Party.
The Mitford sisters wrote many books and even more have been written about them, but Carla Kaplan's...
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long...
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and...
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the...
For the final episode, host Daniel Soar is joined by Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson for a live discussion on the War on Terror and its aftershocks.
They consider the powers and techniques established after 9/11 and now being deployed by the US – in Venezuela, Minneapolis and beyond. What is the legacy of America’s ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East, and...
For the final episode, host Daniel Soar is joined by Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson for a live discussion on the War on Terror and its aftershocks.
They consider the powers and...
Hero and Leander was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a...
Hero and Leander was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.’
On this episode of the podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss some possible answers to those questions. They talk about the history of companies...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment, Camus became a journalist in Algiers and planned his writing career around three concepts based on the figures of Sisyphus, Prometheus and Nemesis, a scheme that he never finished.
Jonathan Rée...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment,...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...
On the Close Readings podcast, longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works.
Listen to our four new series running in 2026: Narrative Poems, Nature in Crisis, London Revisited and Who’s afraid of realism? plus a free bonus series, The Man Behind the Curtain.
How do we give old words new voices? What must a translator lose – and what might she gain – when she moves between languages, bringing ancient stories to modern life? Emily Wilson has spent a lifetime wrestling with these questions. Here, she invites us to consider the meaning and messages of translators from antiquity to today – and offers fresh insights into her own work on Homer.
In the next issue, which will be dated 13 August, Alan Hollinghurst on Firbank.
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