Thirty years ago, well before the advent of Google Street View, I heard about a philosopher invited as a visiting professor to the University of Edinburgh who was thrilled to learn that his office would be in David Hume Tower. Picturing a fortified keep adorned with stepped gables and corbelled turrets, he was sorely disappointed on arrival to discover that the tower was a fourteen-storey...
Whereas in the 18th century David Hume’s irreligion made him a bogeyman, now it is his views on race that have tarnished his reputation. Most obviously, we observe here the shifting parameters of what a society finds unacceptable. However, behind these controversies lurks a much deeper connection between religion and race.
Ifirst met Fredric Jameson more than forty years ago, at one of the sociology of literature conferences at Essex University in the early 1980s. I can’t remember which one, but I know that in July 1982 I gave a talk called ‘Sexual/Textual Politics’. Was Fred there that year? I had recently completed a PhD at Bergen, a university few in England had heard of, and was trying...
Fredric Jameson seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins.
In the long history of mass racial killing in the United States, Nat Turner’s revolt stands out as the one instance in which the perpetrators were Black and the victims white. Beginning late on the night of 21 August 1831, the rebels went from house to house in Southampton County, Virginia, murdering all the white people they could. Their numbers grew as they were joined by enslaved...
My father told me about Nat Turner’s revolt when I asked him, as a child, if enslaved people had ever fought back. I’m still not sure how much of the story he knew. He didn’t talk about the revolt itself, but told me what had happened to Turner after his capture.
Roy Cohn has been dead for forty years, but Donald Trump still yearns for him, his first lawyer and his fiercest. Who else could take an attack meant for Trump and return it a thousand – a million! – times harder? He still sometimes calls out for him: ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ No one was better at making him feel indefeasible. The gossip columnist Cindy Adams...
Roy Cohn has been dead for forty years, but Donald Trump still yearns for him, his first lawyer and his fiercest. Who else could take an attack meant for Trump and return it a thousand – a million! – times harder? He still sometimes calls out for him: ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ No one was better at making him feel indefeasible.
In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February, the prediction market Kalshi set up a trade, a wager in all but name, on the Yes/No proposition that the disgraced Republican ex-congressman George Santos would attend. The larger the number of people who bet ‘Yes’ (or, in the language the prediction markets prefer, bought ‘Yes’...
Beneath a list of current bets on whether there will be a coup in this or that country by a certain date, Polymarket answers the FAQ ‘Why use Polymarket for coup predictions?’ with the response: ‘It cuts through the noise. You get an unbiased view of what thousands of traders think will actually happen, often more accurate than polls.’
In 1963 Shelagh Delaney published a story based on the hate mail and begging letters she received when A Taste of Honey made her famous. ‘It is probably fair to say that it is one of the best plays ever written by a 19-year-old photographer’s assistant. But … she knows as much about adult behaviour as she does about elephants’; ‘Will you lend me...
Shelagh Delaney had written A Taste of Honey when she was nineteen; it took her ten days. It was staged by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1958 and filmed by Tony Richardson in 1961. She had a cushion of money; she had critical acclaim: Graham Greene proclaimed her to be as ‘fresh’ as John Osborne and (not a very high bar) more ‘mature’.
In the last two years, my friends in the Chinese artificial intelligence industry have stopped talking about the singularity. No matter how you define it, we are either already in it or about to be there. If Elon Musk is right (though he did predict we’d be living on Mars by now), AI will surpass the sum of all human intelligence in five years and exceed human control within ten....
As a lazy writer and an even lazier translator, I have found myself without much work in recent years. Five years ago, I was quite confident that AI couldn’t replace human translators. Now, I am forced to admit that only a small amount of the writing we produce requires or deserves a human translator.
In a 2002 speech marking the centenary of Zola’s death, Jacques Chirac said that ‘to speak of Émile Zola is quite simply to speak of France … of this France which … is a language, an idea, an ideal of justice and freedom.’ If it hadn’t been for him, ‘this France’ would still be working on the 1789 Revolution. I don’t think...
There is a less binary way of thinking about the real and the imaginary and we slip into it (perhaps without knowing) as soon as we start to read almost any novel by Zola. Crudely evoked, the movement is based on the notion that reality itself is often fantastic; that language is a wonderful accomplice in this view; that ordinary talking life is full of tropes, exaggerations and indirection.
It can be hard to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. In The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), David Brion Davis showed that from classical antiquity slavery received ‘the highest sanction’ from both religion and philosophy. Aristotle made an especially influential...
It can be hard to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. Seneca was a rare dissenter. In his 47th letter to Lucilius, he wrote: ‘Remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled on by the same skies and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies.’
Emma Cline is an entertainer. Her first book, The Girls (2016), was a sensational reimagining of the Manson Family from the point of view of Evie, a 14-year-old who becomes entangled with the group. She’s not mesmerised by the guru figure, Russell, so much as by his harem – the long-haired, slightly scuzzy, dumpster-diving, shoplifting, insouciant ‘girls’. It is...
The title, Switzy, is a flippant nickname for Switzerland, a place like old age: snow-topped, dim and cold. Emma Cline’s novel hums with luxury: the private plane, the voguish hotels and restaurants, the limousine. And yet those pristine spaces end up merging seamlessly with the institutional nihility of the euthanasia clinic.
Confronted by an obituary tribute to some person I’ve known and valued, I often think of the value J.H. Prynne placed on delivering extempore but pre-plotted eulogies for those who meant most to him. His fellow student and neophyte poet at Jesus College, Cambridge, R.F. Langley, accomplice in church visiting and European travels. His sparring partner and correspondent Ed Dorn. His...
Among the warring tribe of unsponsored fundamentalist poets, a full flush of broadsheet obituaries – the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times – is a light-deflecting singularity. But there are special cases. As if to make recompense for the substantial reviews they never delivered, the major culprits gave generous space to Prynne, who died, aged 89, on 22 April.
Among John Clare’s drawings of ‘pootys’ (snail shells) and birds is a doodle of his imagined tombstone. It bears the inscription: ‘HERE Rest the HOPES and Ashes of JOHN CLARE.’ The masons missed the memo. Clare’s actual memorial, erected after his death in 1864, reads ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, borrowing the epithet from the title page...
Clare was born in 1793 in the village of Helpston in Northamptonshire. When the bookseller Ned Drury met him in 1819, he immediately saw an opportunity to market him as a ‘peasant poet’. Describing Clare in a letter to the publisher John Taylor, Drury wrote: ‘He is low in stature ... ungaitly – awkward – is a fiddler – loves ale – likes the girls – somewhat idle – hates work.’
‘The Flight out of Egypt’ (1849-50).
Richard Dadd ’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, a highlight of the retrospective at the Royal Academy (until 25 October), seems reluctant to give up its secrets. The lighting is crepuscular; tall grass stems stripe the foreground; veined, juicy-looking leaves curtain off the top-right corner. The eye is caught at first...
The Royal Academy’s exhibition sets out to show that there is more to Richard Dadd than the mad artist away with the fairies. Had he not been an inmate of Bedlam then Broadmoor, he would have been, perhaps, a Pre-Raphaelite. Instead, he pursued his own course, developing a visionary style laden with mysterious personal symbolism and private jokes.
In a statement to accompany the accession of Cut Meringues by the Museum of Modern Art following his first New York exhibition in 1962, Wayne Thiebaud suggested that each era produces its own still life. Rather than the props and evidences of discreetly arranged domesticity, he would paint edible America and its impersonal machinery of desire. Cakes and pies and slices and cones,...
Desire is the great leveller in these pictures, and Wayne Thiebaud’s Boston cremes or pumpkin pie slices are like close-ups in the movies. They make us swoon. Even alone in a room with one of his small canvases, the viewer is a ‘We’ rather than an ‘I’.
My boss at the bookshop has said he would sell AI novels if there were clear demand and clear labelling. We almost certainly already sell books . . .
At the first interval in the Berlin Staatsoper’s new production of La Vestale, the man to my right turned to me and said: ‘Mein . . .
Jordan Bardella was supposed to be a different kind of far-right French politician: young, technically savvy, a long way from the poisonous . . .
Lula raised the budget for school lunches, improved access to higher education and free medication, and increased the hiring of public health . . .
Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. She first appeared in the London Review on the letters page in 1993. The first poems . . .
There were still several gendarmerie vans parked near Lycée Hélène Boucher in the 20th arrondissement at noon on Tuesday . . .
The biggest movie at the Chinese box office this August – grossing nearly three times as much as The Odyssey, released the same week – . . .
The Israeli military claims that each individual strike in Gaza is justified but ignores their collective consequences. A reason is given for . . .
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest share for any far-right party in post-1945 Germany. Among the many surprising aspects of the result was the broad, multigenerational support the AfD attracted, on an unusually high turnout of 77 per cent. In this episode, Jan-Werner...
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest share for any far-right party in post-1945...
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now Denmark. After Marcus’ death in 180, his German campaigns were abandoned and the Romans withdrew to the Danube. Some of the demobilised troops returned north and ‘revolutionised their cultural world’, as Michael Kulikowski wrote recently...
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now Denmark. After Marcus’ death in 180, his German...
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956)belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine...
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956)belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator,...
In April this year, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's voting map on the grounds that state lawmakers had violated the constitution by creating a second district with a majority of Black voters. This was followed by a similar decision by the court in June, giving Alabama the green light to eliminate a Black majority district. At the same time, President Trump has called for...
In April this year, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's voting map on the grounds that state lawmakers had violated the constitution by creating a second district with a majority of...
Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but his apparent interest in the structures of Whitehall was less expected. To discuss what we know so far about the direction of Britain’s new government, James is joined by Stephen Bush of the Financial Times and Sienna Rodgers of the...
Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but his apparent interest in the...
In Middlemarch, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political,...
In Middlemarch, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of...
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 bonus series, The Man Behind the Curtain.
Lydia Davis will reflect on some of the concepts of the Stoic philosophers, especially the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. She will associate these concepts with the ideas conveyed by other texts, including some of the English sonnets, and will also describe her attempts to try out the ideas of the Stoics on the vagaries of her own daily life.
In the next issue: James Meek reports from Michigan.
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