For many years I held certain assumptions about Larry McMurtry. Without ever having read his novels, I thought of him as a prolific – perhaps excessively prolific – author of sentimental bestsellers, most of them sequels or prequels to earlier successes. I knew that a few good movies had been adapted from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon,...
McMurtry bemoans the fact that readers take his characters at face value and misidentify cowboy selfishness as heroism. ‘I don’t think these myths do justice to the richness and fullness of human possibility,’ he said. Traditional gender roles don’t make ‘for the best sort of domestic life’. McMurtry’s own domestic life, in both his childhood and adulthood, suggests a kind, sensitive, ambivalent man in perpetual conflict with responsibility and desire, tradition and contemporary morality.
Britain’s ‘world-leading’ university system is in deep trouble. There are, inevitably, conflicting diagnoses of the malady, but the indicators of deteriorating health are too ubiquitous to be ignored. When a substantial number of universities are in serious financial jeopardy, with some hinting at possible bankruptcy in the short term (according to the Office for Students,...
The problems with Britain’s universities are systemic and deep-rooted, not just local or contingent. Yet political and media discussions remain at an almost wilfully superficial level, largely focused on whether the current loan system is ‘unfair’ to students. To go deeper, we need to examine the premises underlying that system and to look at the transformative effects they have had on universities in the past fourteen years.
‘The Janeites’ must be Kipling’s least popular story (though there is competition). Written in 1924 and published in Debits and Credits two years later, it is an abrupt, allusive yarn about a group of English officers and men in northern France near the end of the First World War; and it is narrated by one of them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its effects embrace even the bewildered Humberstall – they save his life. The battery is wiped out by enemy action. Humberstall staggers shell-shocked away, muttering about Miss Bates, and finds the name acts like a password on a bookish senior nurse, who hauls him aboard a packed hospital train. Looking back years later, the still dazed narrator remembers his time as a Janeite as the happiest of his life.’
If we call Shakespeare our greatest literary artist, what makes him so is the equipoise his mind always held between inner and outer worlds. The same is true of Jane Austen. What counted was not the quantity of her knowledge of her world (possibly large in itself), but the use she could make of it.
Like many millions of people, I usually begin my morning doing a few gentle word puzzles on newspaper websites: Connections and Strands in the New York Times, Polygon and Codeword in the Times, plus a couple of others. I do it strictly by the clock so it doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and I don’t take it very seriously – I have till now resisted the endless...
Any scoring system can be abused once it gets captured. But the fact remains that a scoring system can also be the most effective means of exposing value capture by revealing what is happening on the inside. Scoring, like everything else, is not binary. It is dialectical. What makes a game liberating to play is also what makes it stifling and oppressive: in both cases it’s because the rules are arbitrary.
Among the unvaccinated, one in five people who get measles in the US will be hospitalised; one in twenty children will get pneumonia; one in a thousand will develop encephalitis, which can lead to blindness, hearing impairment and other disabilities; and one in a thousand will die. Measles can also lead to immune amnesia: that is, the virus can erase the body’s memory of how to fight all the pathogens it has previously encountered.
Among the unvaccinated, one in five people who get measles in the US will be hospitalised; one in twenty children will get pneumonia; one in a thousand will develop encephalitis, which can lead to blindness, hearing impairment and other disabilities; and one in a thousand will die. Measles can also lead to immune amnesia: that is, the virus can erase the body’s memory of how to fight all the pathogens it has previously encountered.
More than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in sea water. The gigantic archipelagos we call continents consist of 33 per cent desert, 25 per cent mountain and 30 per cent forest. The forested area has been much reduced over the last two thousand years, and in a matter of decades we have shown ourselves capable of melting polar and alpine glaciers and destroying marine...
The Sahara is now one of the most inhospitable places on earth, but not because of the desert. It is a dumping ground in which distant powers and states jettison their problems.
The Winchester Bible (c.1150-80).
‘Apsalm consoles the sad, restrains the joyful, tempers the angry, refreshes the poor and chides the rich man to know himself,’ wrote Niceta of Remesiana, a fourth-century bishop from what is now Serbia. His far better-known contemporary Augustine of Hippo praised the psalms in more flamboyant terms:
How loudly I cried out to you, my God, as I...
The psalms seem deeply familiar, but the not particularly Christian anglophone might struggle actually to provide much detail about them. The Book of Psalms was first written in Hebrew, but like other parts of the modern Bible it came together in its current form over a long period, in this case over five hundred years, roughly from the tenth to the fourth or fifth century BCE, and consists of hymns composed by many different poets.
Across Europe, military leaders are dreaming of war with Russia. Nato’s defence chief, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, has called for a pre-emptive, ‘defensive’ strike (whatever that means); the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said in the autumn that it might have been ‘the last summer of peace for Europeans’. France’s chief of the defence staff, Fabien...
Unlike 20th-century communism or fascism, contemporary Russian ideology does not have a clearly articulated manifesto or creed, but has been formed through successive smaller ideological conflicts. Thus the statist ordoliberalism of the early Putin era was followed by a conservative geopolitical turn, which in turn has been followed by the more eschatological militarism and social conservatism of the last five years.
The road that leads to the city of Shire, the centre of Ethiopia’s gold rush, is pockmarked and warped. My driver told me the origins of each fissure: a drone strike here, an artillery shell there. He was stationed near Shire during the recent war, as a soldier with the Tigray Defence Forces, the popular army that rose up in 2020. All the seatbelts in his car had been cut off and...
Across Tigray, the remains of razed towns are marked with mounds of earth piled over the dead – impressions of war still visible in satellite photographs. A shadow economy has also etched itself onto Tigray’s postwar topography: new mining pits and the heavy machinery that comes with them.
I’m guessing that The Effingers is a roman fleuve – one of those plotty, fast-moving books, not overburdened with inwardness, that might have set Virginia Woolf’s teeth on edge. I say I guess because I don’t think I’ve read one before. I haven’t read Alex Haley, whose Roots is advertised on the back of my old German edition of The Effingers; or Lion...
Gabriele Tergit’s The Effingers is a remarkable way of rendering history. That said, stasis, being, durée, existence, longueurs don’t make much of an appearance. While I quickly lost my belief in the characters (much less my ability to tell them apart), the novel did feel like an ideal way of being told things. What better way of understanding history – especially social or cultural history – than reading a documentary novel like this?
Some Labour MPs always had their doubts about the 1998 Scotland Act. According to Tom Harris, former Labour MP for Glasgow South, there was a joke in the Commons tearoom: ‘Line 1, between “there shall” and “be a Scottish Parliament”, insert “not”.’ Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, Labour’s number of seats has dropped in...
Labour has never really ceased to speak for Scotland. The party has been, if anything, too representative, battling to contain all of the nation’s complexity within itself. Most of its agonies over the years, from the Great Depression to devolution, have reflected the indecision of the whole.
It looks like Britain’s long-standing electoral duopoly is coming to an end. Even though Labour won a huge majority in the 2024 general election, the combined vote share of the two main parties dropped below 60 per cent, the lowest on record. The two-party system we have been used to emerged in the first quarter of the 20th century, a consequence primarily of the growing electoral...
Throughout the 1920s, MacDonald had faced accusations, especially from the left, that he was too fond of aristocratic company and the trappings of office. But it isn’t necessary to accept that his desertion arose from his liking for the ‘aristocratic embrace’ to feel that his vanity left him vulnerable to flattery, that he had an innocent faith in the institutions of the British state and that his ego blinded him to the foreseeable consequences of his actions.
In 1971 Agnès Varda directed an advertisement for Tupperware called ‘Who’s that woman?’ The woman in question has a pixie cut and wears a safari suit; she skips along the pavement, shepherds her children into a Renault and slings an enormous naval bag over her shoulder. There are classic Varda flourishes – sumptuous colour, exuberant cuts synced to the music...
Beneath the whimsy and the wit, Agnès Varda’s films were motivated by contradiction and critique. She said she was always looking for ‘the cliché and what’s inside the cliché’. By the time she died in 2019, at the age of ninety, Varda had herself become a cliché, though this was something she cultivated.
The Gettys were one of the richest families in the world, and Gavin Newsom’s father was their ‘consigliere’. In 1973, when John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Calabrian mafia, it fell to Bill Newsom to fly to Italy to get him back. At first he suspected that his godson – ‘Little Paul’, a trust fund kid locked out of his trust – might have...
Gavin Newsom describes himself as an ‘accidental politician’. The San Francisco mayor Willie Brown anointed him as his preferred successor, though the decisive factor was probably his ability to outspend his rivals by several million dollars. When Newsom became mayor of San Francisco at the beginning of 2004, he was 36 – the youngest in more than a century and an instant Democratic celebrity.
If historians are remembered posthumously, it tends to be for their book titles, while the books themselves gather dust. James Bryce is mostly known today for his surveys of two of history’s great federations: The Holy Roman Empire and The American Commonwealth. He admired both. In some quarters, he retains a more substantial reputation, as a powerful advocate of Anglo-American...
If historians are remembered posthumously, it tends to be for their book titles, while the books themselves gather dust. James Bryce is mostly known today for his surveys of two of history’s great federations: The Holy Roman Empire and The American Commonwealth. He admired both.
Among the unvaccinated, one in five people who get measles in the US will be hospitalised; one in twenty children will get pneumonia; one in . . .
During popular insurrections like the one underway in Bolivia, which is calling for President Rodrigo Paz’s resignation after just six months . . .
Out-of-towners, including Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox, merged with locals outside Southampton police station to form a crowd of several hundred . . .
My back’s feeling better so I’ve started driving for Snapp! again. My first passenger of the night was a man in his mid-fifties, with white . . .
I thought I didn’t use ChatGPT because I was too clever. I thought that not using ChatGPT made me cleverer. It turns out, though, that it made . . .
In the Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, I got into an argument with an Israeli woman who was tearing down Art Not Genocide Alliance signs . . .
It’s unusual for a defeated candidate in an Irish parliamentary by-election to make headlines outside the country. But Gerry Hutch, whose second . . .
Towards the end of April, a bus with fifteen foreign journalists headed north from Kyiv to Chornobyl (the transliteration of the Ukrainian place . . .
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 free bonus series, The Man Behind the Curtain.
Why is the London Review of Books putting out records?
We liked the idea of marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, and drawing on our rich archive of poems made sense. A 7-inch record has space for about eleven minutes of spoken word. Happily, this equates to a long-ish poem – the kind that takes up a whole page or even a double-page spread in the LRB – being read in full.
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