What’s the point of literary criticism? In June the University of Exeter announced plans that might make roughly a third of its English department – one of the best in the country – redundant. Other institutions, including Canterbury Christ Church University, have stopped offering English degrees altogether. Most mainstream publishers now wouldn’t dream of publishing...
Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and maybe set that beside what other cleverer people have thought. Someone else might come along and see it differently, but if you’ve made them argue with you then you’ve done something worthwhile.
Acelebrity entering a room produces a reality distortion field. The energy shifts towards her, accompanied by a general self-consciousness about where to look or avoid looking. To be ordinary and receive a celebrity’s attention can breed self-importance. We have archetypes – the name-dropper, the starfucker – for those who seek out proximity to fame. The tasteful thing is...
Rachel Cusk asks her readers to re-examine what they thought was settled, including, in Life of M, the way each of us relates to the very famous. The celebrity doesn’t need a proper name because she is easy to recognise. She is the avatar of everything we are conditioned to desire: beauty, wealth, Dior.
Over the past twenty months, the US has launched airstrikes in Somalia using MQ-9 Reaper drones and sometimes manned aircraft at an average rate of more than twice a week. Donald Trump may have described it as ‘not even a country’ but objectively Somalia has been one of the US military’s higher priorities since his return to the White House.
Over the past twenty months, the US has launched airstrikes in Somalia using MQ-9 Reaper drones and sometimes manned aircraft at an average rate of more than twice a week. Donald Trump may have described it as ‘not even a country’ but objectively Somalia has been one of the US military’s higher priorities since his return to the White House.
Tweeting from his prison cell, Pakistan’s cricketing hero and former prime minister Imran Khan described the country’s de facto leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, as a mentally unstable, cruel dictator driven by a lust for power. In response, the field marshal’s spokesman called Khan a mentally ill narcissist who believes he stands above the state. The power struggle...
The military exercises its power in all areas of Pakistani society. The question that faces Pakistan today is no longer ‘Who governs Pakistan?’ It’s ‘How will the field marshal use his power?’ Asim Munir’s personal history gives some clues.
Ihave a Rosalía hangover. We climbed a giant day to reach her, all twenty thousand Chicago fans. Strutting and grinning and asterisking her eyes she held their shrieking out around her like a magic cloak and changed them all to rabbits or a vase of tulips inside its folds. The white crinolines. The shrieking. So much to understand. At her every inhalation of breath the entire audience...
We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but she goes on. No one can survive being this intensely cherished, but it is we who are wrung out like sponges watching her, hearts pounding, slightly afraid of what’s next.
He ‘fell down on my threshold like a wounded stag’, Willie Wilde wrote of the moment his younger brother, Oscar, out on bail after the collapse of his first trial for gross indecency, arrived at the small house on Oakley Street that Willie shared with their mother. The image of the stag – too mannered, too detached – suggests a fundamental failure of sympathy. It was...
One of Willie Wilde’s favourite acts was making jokes at the expense of his famous brother: ‘Oscar was NOT a man of bad character: you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere’; ‘Thank God my vices were decent.’ And he flogged the two trunks of fine clothes Oscar had given to him, raising around £12.
Early Netherlandish Drawings (until 20 September) is a stunning exhibition but it needs a bit of space and time to unfold. This is provided in the British Museum’s dimly lit Prints and Drawings galleries, which one can access without navigating the museum’s main entrance and Great Court. From the Montague Place entrance, go straight up the north stairs to level four where,...
The works in this exhibition are visually, iconographically and materially diverse but, when considered together, they present a comprehensive overview of drawing in the Low Countries during a period of great political and societal change. Some, including the only known drawing by Rogier van der Weyden, one of the most influential artists of the 15th century, are so rare you are unlikely ever to see them again.
Anyone would call Luwam Misgina’s place overcrowded, but according to the rules, it isn’t. She lives in a tiny one-bedroom flat in Camberwell, South London, with her three daughters, aged five, eight and eleven. They have one small living room, a cramped kitchenette, a bathroom and a bedroom where they all sleep. Misgina has a mattress on the floor, wedged up against bunk beds....
Now that Southwark has become desirable, the patches of neglect are placeholders for the chains and high-end outlets the landlords expect to move in and pay higher rents when some version of the Berkeley development eventually gets built. To describe this as gentrification, as regeneration, as social cleansing, is valid, but none of these terms quite captures the force of a process that’s not only hard to resist but hard to avoid participating in.
Jonathan Swift was a fan of puns. He found there was no better way to pass a long coach journey than to engage in wordplay in the company of friends. He reported one such exchange in a letter to Thomas Walls in 1708: ‘A Gentleman was mightily afraid of a cat: I told him it was a Sign he was Pus-ilanimous, and Lady Berkeley talking to her Cat, My Lord said she was very impertinent, but...
When the reader of Gulliver’s Travels encounters the land of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos (all of whom are engaged in slave labour), they are invited to consider a question that runs through the book: what does it mean to be recognised and treated as a human being? Is the ascription of humanity a matter of observable characteristics?
Henry Kissinger said that Zhou Enlai had an extraordinary capacity to ‘intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number’. He may have learned about Pat Nixon’s love of pandas on the first evening of the presidential visit in 1972, as they chatted over shark’s fin soup and the People’s Liberation Army Band played ‘Home on the Range’....
Pandas have good PR, but they’re not as cuddly as people think. They have powerful teeth that can chew things a lot tougher than bamboo. One conservationist described watching a panda eat an aluminium pan (and documented the aluminium nuggets that were excreted a few hours later). Though technically vegetarian, they aren’t squeamish about attacking people.
It’s 6.30 in the morning and a bus full of passengers is idling in a town square. All is quiet in the January dawn except for the rumbling engine and the cry of a street vendor selling panelle (chickpea fritters). As the bus pulls away, the conductor spots a man in a dark suit running across the square and calls for the driver to wait. The man is about to jump onto the running board...
The importance of Sicily to Leonardo Sciascia’s writing can’t be overstated, but Italo Calvino perhaps put it best when he said that Sciascia was a ‘local author, rooted, who had made the universal out of those roots’. Sicily and Italy don’t have a monopoly on racketeering; the dynamics of corruption that Sciascia dramatises in his novels are in many respects the same in Westminster or Washington as in Palermo.
Rhoda Power photographed around 1910.
As a child I worried about the Russian Revolution. After all, it failed. At least that’s what schoolfriends, teachers and neighbours said. Yet I knew believers: my parents and a small core of companions who flew the red flag in improbable outposts, first Bath, then the London suburbs. Up to his death in the mid-1980s my dad, far more hardline...
Rhoda Power sailed from Newcastle to Russia in the winter of 1916. She was 27, had a degree in political science and was engaged by a prosperous industrialist in Rostov-on-Don to teach his daughter English. ‘Awakened by screams and shots’, ‘awakened by cries of “Thief” and “Murder”’, she charts the waves of violence encircling her wealthy hosts steadily and without overt political comment.
On 3 August, after a long drive from Dubrovnik Airport, we turned off the Adriatic Highway to rendezvous with a guy on a motorbike, who would show us the way through the darkness to our holiday rental three kilometres further on. The bike’s tail light disappeared around hairpin bends, through patches of construction and unfinished road, before finally plunging down a tiny lane with,...
It was seven o’clock, still light. I took a photograph, zoomed the screen. On the phone the smoke looked dirtier and more yellow, but it also seemed further away. In a wider shot it looked like nothing at all; a close-up showed a dense and unpleasant pall. I scrolled between these images and checked the sky. There was no way to tell how far behind the mountain the fire was.
In a 2005 poll to find the most infamous British villains of the last millennium, Thomas Arundel unexpectedly won the 15th-century nomination, emerging in the public eye as more dastardly than Richard III and as wicked as Jack the Ripper and Oswald Mosley. This startling condemnation reflects Arundel’s place in popular Protestant mythology as the man who persecuted the Lollards and...
Thomas Arundel is badly in need of historical rehabilitation. The man who stands accused of spiritual tyranny over the people because he required the licensing of English Bibles played a central role in first managing and then deposing England’s most complicated royal tyrant. At a time when people were most immediately worried about arbitrary government and the possibility of civil war, Arundel sought to protect them from both.
At the height of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, Bitter Christmas, Raúl, a writer-director played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, has a heated argument with his former assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). Mónica has worked for Raúl for twenty years, and is, as Raúl puts it, his ‘first and best reader’, but she’s recently left...
‘I think it is the riskiest film I’ve ever made,’ Pedro Almodóvar said in a recent interview. ‘I took a whole bunch of risks, even knowing that some might not land.’ If what he means by this is that he risked making a diffuse and somewhat mannered movie, then I would say he has fallen squarely into the trap.
Over the past twenty months, the US has launched airstrikes in Somalia using MQ-9 Reaper drones and sometimes manned aircraft at an average . . .
Not long after 8.30 a.m. on 26 August, a mass of rock and ice, more than six hundred metres wide, broke off the face of Langtang Lirung, a mountain . . .
One of the main differences between today’s far right and the fascism of the mid-20th century is the absence of a uniformed paramilitary . . .
The story of the Blitz cannot be fully understood as a national story. It was part of a global war. While the Luftwaffe attacked industrial . . .
By July, our tent had become almost impossible to live in. As soon as the sun rose, the fabric trapped the heat, turning the small space into . . .
Last month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez published a series of Instagram posts documenting the process of freezing her eggs. In the last video . . .
It’s an understatement to say that Dolly Parton, who died on Tuesday, was many things to many people. She was multifaceted in a way that . . .
The Wittockiana museum has a slight air of mystery. Deep in suburban Brussels, crouching discreetly behind ramparts of greenery, it’s . . .
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: Thomas Meaney on the West.
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