Search help and tips

Quick search

Quick search returns results for all of the words you enter. For more precise results, use the Advanced search.

When searching for a review of a particular title, or a known phrase or name from an article, the exact phrase search is often the best place to begin (e.g. exact phrase: the prophet outcast).

If you are searching for an article with a particular contributor and an author or subject, the all the words option is often the best (e.g. all the words: terry eagleton george orwell).

A combination of all the words and excluding the words can be useful to refine unmanagably numerous search results (e.g. all the words: shakespeare tragedy excluding the words: hamlet).

The minimum word-length for a search is three characters. Searching for very common words which might appear more than half of the articles on the site (e.g. available, because, contain – you can view a list of these words), a single character or a two-character string will only work as part of an exact phrase search (e.g. exact phrase: second century bc).

The Name search option is useful if you want to find articles by a particular contributor or reviews of titles by a particular author. Names of authors and contributors are listed Firstname Lastname (e.g. name search: Penelope Fitzgerald).

Searches are not case sensitive (e.g. Hilary Mantel is the same as hilary MANTEL.

Other search options

The LRB website is thoroughly indexed on the major public search engines. Searching the LRB via these services will only return results on articles which are available for free to all site users. If you would like to search the content of the LRB in this way, try the Google search or the Yahoo! search options

Indexes

Sometimes our site indexes are the best way of finding content. At the moment we index our content by subject, contributor and publisher. The subject index is useful to get an overview of the LRB's coverage of broad subject areas. The index of contributors gives a full list of all articles by all contributors to the magazine going back to the beginning of 1998 (although not all articles are currently available online). The publisher index lists by publisher all titles which have been reviewed in the LRB going back to the beginning of 1998.