London Review of Books

One of Gordon Brown's first acts as chancellor in 1997 was to give the Bank of England 'operational responsibility for setting interest rates'. For many years this rarely attracted any discussion, but in more recent times, as prices have risen and the economic outlook darkened, the role of the Bank of England in not only controlling inflation but also influencing the economy in other ways...

One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons’.Lorraine joins Tom to explore the ways that ideas about extinction are warped by our timescales and politics. They discuss how the...

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...

Jon McNaught has created more than forty covers for the LRB as well as artwork for books, diaries, posters and campaigns. In this film he takes us through the process of making a cover, from inspiration, sketches and photographs to creating the final artwork using various techniques and materials including watercolours, ink, chinagraph pencil, masking fluid, tape and scissors. He...

J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that still dominated English readers’ appreciation and expectations. Pioneers in the liminal spaces between literary and ‘genre’ fiction, and...

When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was governed by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis’, of a system ruled entirely from the top down. Her examination of the ministry papers of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment after the Revolution, challenged this view,...

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland.

In this extended extract from Novel Approaches, a Close Readings...

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...