London Review of Books

From the blog

As the #CoronaContract campaign documents, casualised staff at universities across the UK will be hit especially hard by the fallout from Covid-19. Many have experienced financial hardship already, through the loss of promised work hours or their institutions’ refusal to furlough them. Some have had their contracts terminated prematurely. And things will get worse, as universities across the country announce the non-renewal of casual contracts, hiring freezes and redundancies. To fight racism at universities, we need to concern ourselves not only with the future recruitment of Black academics (there are only seven or so Black professors at Oxford), which the mechanisms of casualisation obstruct, but also with the urgent difficulties facing insecure workers currently in the university’s employ.

Amia Srinivasan

I’ve had the wrong pronouns used for me – ‘he/him’ instead of ‘she/her’ – by two people, as far as I know. One of them was an editor at this paper, who I am told used to refer to me as ‘he’ when my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of...

Consider the Hare

Katherine Rundell

Hares have always been thought magical. In their long-limbed quivering beauty, they were believed to be walking, breathing love potions. Philostratus warned his third-century readers that there were unscrupulous men out there who had found in the hare ‘a certain power to produce love and try to secure the objects of their affection by the compulsion of magic art’. Pliny...

Diary

In Mali

Rahmane Idrissa

As it usually is in September, Dakar was sweltering and sticky. I’d come to examine back issues of the Bulletin de l’Institut fondamental français d’Afrique noire in the National Archives, looking for material on the Songhay empire. For some reason, BIFAN, the most important scientific journal of Francophone black Africa, isn’t available online. Songhay was...

James Meek

At the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic it was gravely expected that the Euro-American countries would hold firm, with their sophisticated healthcare systems based around high-tech hospitals, while the disease would cut a terrible swathe through Africa. The question of solidarity, or the lack of it, would come down to how much or how little the rich countries were willing to give the less well-off. So far it hasn’t happened that way. The formerly colonised countries, with their thinly resourced health systems, have been spared the worst; it is the old colonisers, with their ventilators and ECMO machines, that have suffered. Senegal has had far fewer deaths than France, the Democratic Republic of Congo far fewer than Belgium, Kenya far fewer than Britain. That may yet change. More remarkable is the way the epidemic has exposed a lack of solidarity within Western countries themselves. The debate about the path of global health improvements turns out to be meaningful within countries as well.

In the latest issue

2 July 2020

At the Type Archive

Alice Spawls

The Type Archive near Stockwell in London used to be a hospital for cab horses and circus animals, but since 1992 it has been home to every sort of mould, matrix, burin, bodkin and slug. The archive holds typographical apparatus from the last six hundred years, but its main collection relates to the technology of Monotype printing. That capital letter is important: this isn’t the...

The casting machine is a clattering, chattering steampunk fantasy, but it’s also incredibly refined. It contains more than four thousand parts, creates four inches of text in less than a minute and can run unattended for hours. And it’s no artefact: on my last visit to the Type Archive it was hooked up to a Mac laptop, like a patient on a drip, reading a Word file and sending out line after line of Hungry Dutch (the first new typeface created for Monotype in decades).

Adam Mars-Jones

During the US presidential campaign of 2016 Louis Amis wrote a scabrous satirical story from the point of view of a member of Trump’s team, a daring exercise in fantasy that was revealed as hopelessly timid when the election result was announced. Jenny Offill’s novel Weather is an attempt to grapple with a future that is hard to inhabit imaginatively, the consequences of climate...

Cultural Pillaging

Neal Ascherson

Afew months after the end of the Second World War, Stephen Spender returned to Germany. His plan was to contact German intellectuals. This was not very fruitful: most were dead or in exile, and Ernst Jünger, whom he did meet, evaded his invitation to show unqualified guilt for the Nazi past. But then Spender was asked to reopen libraries in the British zone of occupation, having first...

From the blog

Labour’s Short-Term Thinking

Jude Wanga

30 June 2020

On Friday – when the Conservative government was attempting to shrug off another day of scandal focused on the housing minister, Robert . . .

After Rhodes Falls

Natalya Din-Kariuki

29 June 2020

As the #CoronaContract campaign documents, casualised staff at universities across the UK will be hit especially hard by the fallout from Covid-19 . . .

The Backlash

Arianne Shahvisi

27 June 2020

On hot weekends when I was child we’d go to the paddling pool in Burnley’s Thompson Park. We’d drive over from our house in . . .

Across the World in Forty Hours

Kimia Maleki

26 June 2020

At Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport you come out into the arrivals hall not through an opaque set of automatic doors but down an escalator . . .

Singing Together, Apart

Rachael Beale

25 June 2020

After a performance of Bach’s St John Passion in the Concertgebouw on 8 March, 102 of the 130-strong Amsterdam Gemengd Koor fell ill. Forty-five . . .

A Hemisphere in Freefall

Forrest Hylton

24 June 2020

Brazil’s official Covid-19 death toll has more than doubled since I last wrote, four weeks ago, with 51,407 deaths and more than a million . . .

After Amphan

Skye Arundhati Thomas

23 June 2020

On 20 May, Super-Cyclone Amphan hit West Bengal and Bangladesh with wind speeds of over 200 kilometres per hour. It tore through embankments . . .

Fauxpologies

Arianne Shahvisi

22 June 2020

‘The readiness of the English to apologise for something they haven’t done is remarkable,’ Henry Hitchings writes in Sorry! . . .

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Notice from Bury Place:

Like most other businesses, we have taken the decision to close both the London Review Bookshop and the Cake Shop until further notice. All events and late shopping evenings due to be held in the spring have been postponed indefinitely, but we’ve recorded a few of them as podcasts, and we’ve also launched LRB Screen at Home, a new, free series of online film events: join us on the bookshop’s YouTube channel every Wednesday evening at 7 p.m. A selection of books and book boxes curated by our booksellers is also now available for online purchase. Stay tuned for news of our plans for reopening, and many thanks for your support.

In the next issue: Pankaj Mishra on the sickness of Anglo-America.

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