Lectures & Events

In 1928, the V&A acquired a previously unknown portrait. It shows the Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. Fara Dabhoiwala reveals the astonishing story of the painting’s true meaning, its connections to the greatest scientists of the Enlightenment — and Francis Williams’s extraordinary message to posterity.

The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. This lecture will examine various aspects of that history – culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology – in an attempt to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.

In her LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby explores the ways indigenous artists are reconstructing histories that have been lost or erased, and imagining new futures in a time of imminent catastrophe.

In his LRB Winter Lecture delivered on 28 February 2024, Pankaj Mishra considers the ways in which our moral and political consciousness is profoundly altered when Israel, a country founded as a haven for the victims of genocidal racism, is itself charged with genocide.

Emily Wilson discusses her landmark translation of the Iliad with Edith Hall, with readings from Juliet Stevenson and Tobias Menzies.

Following the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and other challenges to reproductive rights, Clair Wills considers the stories we tell about abortion – in fiction, film, court rulings and clinics.

William Davies's 2023 LRB Winter Lecture looks at why reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become the main currency of the digital public sphere.

In his 2020 LRB Winter Lecture, Richard Lloyd Parry considers the paradoxical figure of Akihito, who abdicated in April 2019: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right.

Given what we know about the future of the planet, Meehan Crist asks: is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us?

Colin Burrow ranges from Homer to Ian McEwan in his search for the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction, in this LRB Winter Lecture.

We look back at 40 years of the LRB in our anniversary event at Conway Hall.

Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity.

Christopher Clark explains why the revolutions of 1848 weren’t failures, and why we should think about them now.

Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet and wonders why we're talking like this.

Rosemary Hill looks at women and clothes, and what happens between them, in life and literature, in her 2018 LRB Winter Lecture.