At Narva in north-east Estonia, Hermann Castle, a reconstructed Teutonic fort, sits directly opposite Ivangorod Fortress on the Narva river. The two castles are only about 150 metres apart, but between them lies the border between Nato territory and Russia. In the 18th century the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia began at Narva. The German empire and the Bolsheviks fought there...
War-fi accounts accurately depict the frontier between Europe and Russia as being in an unstable equilibrium. But they all conveniently ascribe this to dynamics endogenous to Russia, which figures as a metastasising cancer for which one is either prepared or not. The risk of war derives from the existence, or non-existence, of Obmanshchikov or Belov or Putin.
Olga Freidenberg, a Russian literary scholar born in Odessa in 1890, best known as a cousin and youthful confidante of Boris Pasternak, had what looks on the face of it like a successful Soviet career. Child of a family of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, which in the early Soviet state was both a minus and a plus, she benefited from the revolution, entering university with the first...
‘Siege’ became a key metaphor in Olga Freidenberg’s analysis of her own life and that of Soviet society; and she experienced Leningrad during the blockade as a ‘domestic concentration camp’ into which she had been forced by the ‘bloodthirsty serpent’, Stalin. She blamed Leningrad’s sufferings during the blockade as much on Stalin as on Hitler.
Democracies aren’t doing well. The Brexit referendum, Donald Trump’s electoral victories and the rise of far-right parties across Europe have created a sense of democratic disarray. Yet, publicly at least, no one has dared to call into question universal suffrage as the source of political legitimacy. Imagine an electoral system in which the franchise would require a university...
Hegelians will admire the encapsulation of the era’s contradictions in a single individual. Most of us will be puzzled by his fickleness. Louis Bonaparte’s personal life reinforces the sense of his shallow inconsistency. He was a philanderer, but one who neither felt nor elicited great passion. One of his conquests remarked on the swiftness of the rendezvous: ‘It had taken only half an hour to make me an empress.’
Earlier this year someone told me they’d seen ‘something online’ about Andy Burnham, back when he was mayor of Greater Manchester, appearing on Celebrity Mastermind and taking the life and works of Anthony Burgess as his specialist subject. It didn’t end well: Burnham came to grief on the sharp rocks at the foot of the sheer cliff-face of the gargantuan,...
For a certain kind of northern man, Burgess has always been – for once the term is apt – something of an icon. A bit mouthy and contrarian. Not part of the self-regarding London literary establishment. A Big Canvas man, equally at home with Beethoven or Shakespeare. The local hero did have an Achilles’ heel, though. Burgess had to leave his birthplace early to find – or invent – himself.
Gandhi’s adversaries seem to have prevailed. The last generation of his disciples is dying off, and his pedestal can now be dismantled. In the LRB in 2012, Perry Anderson could still describe a reverent consensus around the Mahatma, which he then assailed with a catalogue of Gandhi’s missteps and obdurate follies. In 2014, Arundhati Roy wrote an introduction to Annihilation of...
In 2014, Hindu nationalists won the general election in India: power was now held by admirers of Savarkar, who had been tried as an accomplice to Gandhi’s assassination, and of Nathuram Godse, who had fired the gun. The assassins’ point of view – that Gandhi was a misguided pacifist who had appeased Muslims and compromised Hindu interests – had become the establishment’s.
When Francis Ford Coppola won the Razzie Award for Worst Director for his film Megalopolis last year, he responded with a long Instagram caption beneath a zoomed-in photo of his face.
I am thrilled to accept the Razzie Award … at a time when so few have the courage to go against the prevailing trends of contemporary moviemaking! In this wreck of a world today, where ART is given...
It’s not enjoyable to look at a crap painting (though Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two of the biggest Hollywood hitmakers of all time, each own a large collection of Norman Rockwells), and most people, even if they like bad books or music, don’t like them because they’re bad but because they think they’re good. Why, then, are some bad movies so much fun?
At the end of The Coral Island (1857), the teenage castaways are rescued from bloodthirsty ‘savages’ by the arrival of Christian missionaries. R.M. Ballantyne’s most famous book – which was required reading for British and American schoolchildren until the middle of the 20th century – pitches an ideal of Victorian boyhood against godless pirates and backward...
William Golding didn’t push back on any of the suggested revisions: you get the impression that he would have done just about anything to get the novel published. He readily accepted that ‘Strangers from Within’ was a weak title. Alan Pringle, his editor’s colleague, eventually suggested ‘Lord of the Flies’. On 11 February 1954 – more than a year after Golding had first sent out the manuscript – Charles Monteith accepted it for publication. Golding was pathetically grateful.
Have Danny Tommo (aka Daniel Thomas) and his followers in Patriot Platform read Luke Kennard’s new novel, which has just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize? Even the dust jacket might be enough to persuade a Stop the Boats protester that covering yourself head-to-ankle in a black bag is an advance on black balaclavas and Mosleyite black shirts. Patriot Platform claims to embrace...
Luke Kennard’s Black Bag spans several genres while not belonging to any of them. It’s not quite a campus novel but has things to say about what it’s like to teach at a university. It’s not quite a satire on the theatre world but says more about acting than Rachel Cusk does in her latest novel, Life of M. It’s not a surreal parable but the central bag image is as haunting as Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
‘No period has writers who play more difficult games with fact and factuality than the Augustan,’ Barbara Everett wrote in 1985. ‘This helps to make Pope the most interesting and problematic of subjects for biography.’ It also helps to make him an interesting and problematic choice for editors, since any Collected Works involves a narrative of authorial progression and...
Alexander Pope’s works are full of the voices and characters of other people, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, and his writings are intensely committed to ideas of companionship and community. They are also intensely involved with psychologically astute visions of solitude and abandonment.
In 1987 the American artist Paul Thek heard that his former lover and friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, was dying of complications from Aids. When they were together in 1960s New York, Andrew Durbin writes in his joint biography, other people felt ‘extraneous in the room’; a younger gay man, watching them being extravagantly gay at a time when most homosexuals were in the...
Almost in exchange for the trustingness of his subjects, Peter Hujar became a different person when he was behind the camera: his rage, which caused one of his close friends to describe him in an obituary as the ‘angriest person’ he knew, would disappear. He was ‘possessed’ by the act of taking photographs.
According to Stephen Campbell, around 250 books about Leonardo were published at the time of the 500th anniversary of his death in 2019, of which about fifty were biographies. It is hard to imagine any other painter or sculptor, living or dead, ever attracting this kind of attention, but it is equally hard to attribute it to Leonardo’s artistic talent, especially as he is chiefly...
It is hard to imagine any other painter or sculptor, living or dead, ever attracting this kind of attention, but it is equally hard to attribute it to Leonardo’s artistic talent, especially as he is chiefly known for one work, the Mona Lisa (or two, if one considers the almost wholly repainted Last Supper). Leonardo is considered to be not just an artist, but a man with an astonishing range of interests and insights, someone for whom there is no historical parallel.
In August 1975, residents of Columbus, Ohio found something strange stuffed under their car windscreen wipers – a single sheet of typescript, which consisted of what looked at first glance like a series of small ads:
FOUND: Photo album with family snapshots, left eye cut out of each person photographed. Vicinity Southern Hotel. 984-7321 before 10.
Another typescript followed in...
With its crude Courier typeface, Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts was the publishing equivalent of a punk 7-inch single – spontaneous and scabrous, capturing the raw energy of the moment. Or, to use an analogy more in tune with the early 1960s, these poetry magazines had the force of protest music, and amid the bohos and beatniks of Lower Manhattan, the two often overlapped.
The Jasper Johns retrospective at Guggenheim Bilbao (until 12 October) includes nearly 140 works: more than fifty paintings, along with sculptures, drawings, prints, an artist’s book and a stage design. Working my way through the show, I tried to imagine Johns as the young man whose stab at formal training – three semesters studying art in the late 1940s and a brief stint at...
Artists used to learn their craft through imitation, and one could learn a lot from copying Johns’s paintings: where the pictorial commas are; the way an image becomes an object; how an edge changes the meaning of a surface. They reveal almost everything about the way they are made, and almost nothing about how they are meant to be read. The lesson, perhaps, is that paintings teach us to look before they ask what we’ve seen.
When the former Conservative Party treasurer Alistair McAlpine died in 2014, he was hailed as the most successful fundraiser in modern British political history. His approach was simple: ‘I used to lurk. I lurked all over London where rich people went.’ McAlpine’s courting of prospective Tory donors typically involved ‘a long lunch during which his victim was...
British politics has long been complacent about the power of big money. The relatively low price of access to politicians here – admission to the Leader’s Group of top Tory donors costs just £50,000 – has often been interpreted, wrongly, as a sign of probity. The current Representation of the People Bill reflects this view.
On 16 June, a yacht flying the Red Ensign and a Russian frigate called Admiral Grigorovich approached each other in the English Channel, around twenty nautical miles south of the Isle of Wight and thus outside the United Kingdom’s territorial waters. As the distance between the two vessels lessened to about a quarter of a mile, the warship blasted its horn five times, repeated the...
Unregistered and undetectable fleets cut into the profits of the big tanker companies. After the first Trump administration imposed sanctions on Iranian and Venezuelan oil, the number of ghost ships carrying these countries’ oil tripled and the price of old ships due to be scrapped increased because they started to be redeployed as ghost ships.
If the radical agenda is real, it points to an early general election. Burnham said that the National Care Service will be introduced ‘in . . .
For a little over a year, the theatre directors Milo Rau and Servane Dècle have been touring a play based on the Pelicot mass rape trial . . .
In Iran, as elsewhere, GLP-1 agonists such as semaglutide and tirzepatide offer a chance to address obesity, improve organ functioning and treat . . .
Given much of the coverage of the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sheeran had been dropped from his tour . . .
The frenzy in Israel surrounding the documentary NAZA is fundamentally undemocratic. That is what happens after years of extreme right-wing . . .
The Smiths kicked off the Scottish leg of their Meat is Murder tour at the Magnum Leisure Centre in Irvine New Town on 22 September 1985, and . . .
Kok-boru is a horseback sport related to polo, played with a headless goat carcass rather than a ball and mallets. The equestrian scrums are . . .
Planning regulations were modified last year, with AI data centres redefined as ‘nationally significant infrastructure projects’ . . .
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: Iain Sinclair on J.H. Prynne; Deborah Friedell on Roy Cohn.
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