It is an existential condition that we never know the internal state of another being with certainty.
Andrea Celenza, Transference, Love, Being
The superego, which has all too easily passed into ordinary language as the secular equivalent of the conscience, has had a rather chequered career as both an idea and as one of the main ‘characters’ in our so-called internal world....
The superego – and its precursor, conscience – refers to the part of us that has no curiosity about ourselves. It’s the saboteur of curiosity about ourselves. And that part of us, like a narrow-minded fascist, has only one project: to destroy our pleasures in being alive by trying to kill our curiosity (or by making us frightened of our curiosity, which amounts to the same thing).
Since the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, the temporary transfer of presidential powers has become almost routine – usually for a colonoscopy. The amendment has never faced its more serious test, though in the first Trump administration the possibility was often discussed. Omarosa Newman, an Apprentice contestant turned Trump aide, says that White House staff developed a shorthand, #TFA, which they texted one another whenever ‘he did something that was just so insane and so crazy and unhinged’.
Since the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, the temporary transfer of presidential powers has become almost routine – usually for a colonoscopy. The amendment has never faced its more serious test, though in the first Trump administration the possibility was often discussed. Omarosa Newman, an Apprentice contestant turned Trump aide, says that White House staff developed a shorthand, #TFA, which they texted one another whenever ‘he did something that was just so insane and so crazy and unhinged’.
Russell Brand has been sentenced to ten years in prison for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others. Brand claimed that the encounters were all consensual even though he couldn’t remember them. ‘Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary,’ he told the court. Obvious as this should be, Brand’s past boasts imply that he saw consent not as a bare minimum, but as an obstacle to be overcome.
Russell Brand has been sentenced to ten years in prison for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others. Brand claimed that the encounters were all consensual even though he couldn’t remember them. ‘Consent is fundamental, essential, necessary,’ he told the court. Obvious as this should be, Brand’s past boasts imply that he saw consent not as a bare minimum, but as an obstacle to be overcome.
In March 1973, before taking his new play, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, around the village halls of the Highlands, John McGrath accepted a last-minute invitation to perform it at a leftist conference in Edinburgh. This was tricky: he was still writing on the morning of the performance. Bill Paterson recalls McGrath handing out notes to the cast as they stepped on stage....
Girning about hydro power in Strathglass is a bit like moving to Soho and complaining about the noisy nightlife. This energy landscape isn’t ideal if you’re in search of wildness. For Kassabova, the present upheaval is a further instance of ‘industrial ways’ being imposed on native pastoralism. The history she gives is uncertain.
Richard Wollheim once recalled receiving a postcard from Adrian Stokes some time in the early 1960s (the postcard, he said, was ‘tantalisingly dated “Tuesday afternoon”’), which contained the sentence: ‘I shall discipline and keep myself in trim in wondering for what simple reason Palestrina avoided concerning himself with a tone poem on the plangent fountains...
Music’s Odyssey is a hecatomb of sacred cows: Hildegard of Bingen (‘psychedelic bore’); the first movement of Beethoven’s Op. 111 (‘melodrama, histrionics, false pathos, rodomontade’); Brahms’s second piano concerto (‘saggy self-indulgence’); Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony (a ‘dead-sea fruit’); Philip Glass (‘hapless inanity’). This is fun, whether one protests or sends up a silent cheer.
The Roman Empire has left its mark on the West as a model of power, governance and society. Since its founding, the United States has styled itself as a republic, complete with Senate, checks and balances; modern European empires attempted infrastructure projects reminiscent of the ancient engineering works that carved straight roads and aqueducts through alien territories, and claimed a...
There are better ways of illuminating the lives of ordinary people in the Roman Empire than through literary texts written by the upper classes. The array of ancient source material now available includes ledger accounts and army logs, notes, letters and notarised documents; there are papyri preserved by the arid conditions of Egypt and wooden tablets that survived in the waterlogged, anaerobic conditions of Hadrian’s Wall.
Do you know someone who values original ideas and incisive analysis? Give them a subscription to the LRB for as little as £29.99
Tom Cruise has made a career out of playing cocksure studs sporting with danger: the teenybopper pin-up with a death wish. When he was young, he seemed to literally shine, reflecting light off his Ray-Bans and his famous back-of-the-cereal-box smile (the kind of all-American smile Jean Baudrillard called ‘auto-prophetic’: ‘Smile and others will smile back’). But...
The last time Tom Cruise played a villain seriously was more than two decades ago, silver-haired and wolfish as a hitman in Michael Mann’s Collateral (2004) – the last chill of sociopathy before his Herculean efforts at reputation laundering began. There’s a reason Digger’s prosthetics look like one of the latex masks Cruise peels off in the Mission Impossible films: he’s not meant to be Tom Cruise.
At the end of September, Google Maps updated its satellite images of Gaza from the set taken in the summer of 2023. Entire cities have disappeared, wiped from the surface of the Earth. Some names still hover over the indistinct dunes of rubble. Pins marking the Green Farm pharmacy, Abu Khalid bakery, Jalal grocery, Al Qarara Museum, Algerian Hospital, Lama coffee shop for women, Abuahmad...
Gaza has been experiencing an old-fashioned scorched-earth campaign reminiscent of the Nakba of 1948 and no different from the settler-colonial genocides of previous centuries. Yet much of the outrage generated by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s film NAZA concerns Israel’s use of artificial intelligence and other computational technologies to select targets and calculate how many people will be killed.
Of all Wagner’s operas, Lohengrin is the most swan-concerned. It’s true that Parsifal has a narratively propulsive swan-shooting incident in Act 1, which is a great relief for audience members feeling desperate about the lack of action up to this point. (Everyone on stage has been standing still and shout-singing about the king’s bath for 45 minutes.) It is in Lohengrin,...
To be in or even near Bayreuth is to have Wagner drilled into your consciousness. The festival lasts for a month, consisting exclusively of repeat performances of his operas, and everything in the town is oriented towards him. Wagner’s face is everywhere, on busts and billboards and flyers for hair salons, staring down from ads for Pilates studios with that off-puttingly candid look in his eye and the trace of hysteria about his pressed lips.
Some people convert to Catholicism to answer their doubt, others to give their doubt shelter. Fanny Howe belonged to the latter party. ‘Did I have faith or was it hype,’ she asks in one poem. And later: ‘Did I believe or was it hope.’ Even within the idiosyncratic terms of her faith she was a refusenik: ‘I am secular. I walk the streets./I feel sorry for...
Fanny Howe’s poems station us somewhere between pilgrimage and itinerancy. Pilgrimage implies devotion and destination; itinerancy is governed by precarity and happenstance. This oscillation is characteristic of Howe, who proposed – in what is probably her most famous essay, ‘Bewilderment’ – ‘bewilderment as a poetics and a politics’. Her aim is precisely, paradoxically, to get lost.
What happened to the veterans of Occupy Wall Street? In the case of Bree Hietala, she moved to Detroit with her husband, bought cheap derelict houses left behind in the city’s decline and abandonment, fixed them up and rented them out. They planted an urban farm on empty lots where houses had once been. Hietala started a flower business with a friend. She had two children. She began...
‘You know, I’m a lifelong Democrat. My parents were Democrats. I am no longer. I would not say I’m part of that party,’ she said. ‘I am a person with no party. I think most people feel that way.’
‘But you’re still with Abdul El-Sayed?’
‘One million per cent. But he’s outside the Democrats.’
Football players and managers often use the phrase ‘the dark arts’ to refer to practices that stretch, but don’t always break, the rules. Examples include time-wasting of various kinds, feigning injury and – most recently – what’s described as ‘grappling’, usually inside the penalty area during corners. Off the field, they include putting...
Helenio Herrera’s life was enveloped in layers of fantasy and invention. He even faked his date of birth. We can’t know for certain what went on in dressing rooms and team hotels or on training grounds when Herrera was a manager in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. What we do have are many, often contradictory, stories told by players, managers and journalists trying to sell papers – oral histories, essentially, many of them unverifiable.
‘A Man who Suddenly Fell Over’ (1952).© The estate of Michael Andrews / Tate.
‘And immediately/Rather than words comes the thought of high windows’. Note the rhetorical sleight of hand: what, if not words, is Larkin coming forth with? But you fall for his gambit because during the preceding lines of ‘High Windows’, speaking voices have...
Michael Andrews did not achieve brand recognition of the kind secured by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, with their readily identifiable manners and bodies of imagery. Yet those older friends of his would, I think, have understood my own testimony as a painter in Andrews’s wake: that his work presents as high a challenge as anything in 20th-century British art.
Missouri Williams’s novels are vicious, lurid and raucously nihilistic. Her first book, The Doloriad (2022), is set outside a ruined Prague, where an incestuous clan – the only known survivors of an unspecified apocalyptic event – scramble in the dirt. At first four people remained: the Matriarch, her brother, the brother’s wife and a legless schoolmaster. The...
Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors presents a bleak view of academic institutions. Its scholars are fraudulent and vain: ‘Their activity was a sham. All they did was generate piles of useless papers that they used to justify the continued existence of their departments.’ The university is little more than a breeding ground for a vapid politics of victimisation.
Early Wallace and Gromit character development (1989).© and TM Aardman Animations LTD, Wallace & Gromit LTD. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Animation was invented in France, but plasticine was invented in Britain. In 1892, Charles-Émile Reynaud showed his Théâtre Optique for the first time in Paris: hundreds of hand-drawn images on...
Everything in an Aardman film is at a small scale: there’s a playfulness that nods to its young audience, to the child’s repurposing of household objects for games. These animators spend their days tinkering with plasticine, which for most people is the stuff of childhood. Big, shiny technology is often the source of agitation and danger in the films.
Since the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967, the temporary transfer of presidential powers has become almost routine – usually for a . . .
Russell Brand has been sentenced to ten years in prison for raping one woman and sexually assaulting three others. Brand claimed that the encounters . . .
The office of the Moroccan Association for Aid to Migrants in Vulnerable Situations is arranged over two floors in a modest building in Oujda . . .
Between 1 May and 31 August, more than twenty thousand laboratory-confirmed cases of cyclosporiasis were reported to the US Centres for Disease . . .
Knowledge produced through public institutions such as the British Library is being enclosed by AI companies and publishing oligopolies that . . .
The government’s justification for its reform of the courts has shifted from clearing the backlog to modernisation and rationalisation . . .
How did Lula defeat Bolsonaro so handily, by a far greater margin than in 2022, after losing in the first round? How did the hoped-for virada . . .
On Wednesday, 21 October, four days after France’s biggest student protest in a generation, Inès stood in the rain outside Art . . .
It’s been more than three years since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, and Israel responded with a war of annihilation in Gaza that human rights organisations and experts widely describe as genocide. A ceasefire of sorts is in place, though it has allowed the killing and destruction to continue. The people of Gaza are confined to less than a third of their land, reduced to...
It’s been more than three years since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, and Israel responded with a war of annihilation in Gaza that human rights organisations and experts widely...
Despite Andy Burnham’s declared ambition to end forty years of neoliberalism, the first budget under his leadership was limited to cautious measures focused on cost-of-living pressures. What lies behind this inertia, and the apparent resistance of the British state to any transformative policies? James Butler is joined by Aditya Chakrabortty, the Guardian’s senior economics...
Despite Andy Burnham’s declared ambition to end forty years of neoliberalism, the first budget under his leadership was limited to cautious measures focused on cost-of-living pressures. What...
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of the King came in 1859. But in 1861 he took a break from Arthurian romance to try something different, a narrative poem based on an old yarn about a man who goes missing at sea for more than ten...
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of...
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi...
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the...
Tom McCarthy, writing in the London Review of Books, described James Joyce's 'Ulysses' as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior...
Tom McCarthy, writing in the London Review of Books, described James Joyce's 'Ulysses' as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’;...
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi...
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be...
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived...
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote...
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that...
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have...
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the...
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention,...
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 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...
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,...
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...
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...
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many losers’. On this episode, he joins Thomas Jones to discuss how prediction markets...
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either...
Jonathan Rée will give the first of our 2027 lectures on the invention of Marxism (11 February), followed by Sheila Fitzpatrick on sovietology and the new Cold War (25 February) and Emily Wilson on likemindedness in Homer and other ancient literature (11 March).
View details of each lecture and buy tickets here.
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.
In the next issue, which will be dated 26 November, Lydia Davis on the Stoics; Julian Barnes on Renoir; Christopher Clark on Weimar Germany.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.
This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run.
