The World Cup, launched in 1930, is the most popular sporting event on the planet: one of Fifa’s less implausible recent claims is that 1.5 billion people watched the 2022 final in Doha. Football, as Jonathan Wilson has done as much as any football writer to demonstrate, matters in multiple dimensions, but the World Cup has a magnetism all its own, drawing in millions who don’t...
This World Cup, unlike Russia 2018, is hosted by democratic nations, and unlike Qatar 2022 the walkways to its stadiums are not paved with bones. But it will forever be associated with newly obscene levels of fan exploitation, with Fifa’s remorseless commodification of the people’s game set to result in a gated tournament confined to those few with the requisite income, visa status and social media history.
Recently I had an opportunity to check in on the state of American Catholicism. The occasion was a tradcath wedding in St Louis, greyscale city of my teenage years, and the last place I truly believed in demons. I left in 1999, just before my senior year of high school. My friends would celebrate the turn of the millennium without me, but in escaping I also narrowly missed a more...
Recently I had an opportunity to check in on the state of American Catholicism. The occasion was a tradcath wedding in St Louis, greyscale city of my teenage years, and the last place I truly believed in demons. I left in 1999, just before my senior year of high school. My friends would celebrate the turn of the millennium without me, but in escaping I also narrowly missed a more tailor-made end of the world.
Ifirst met Hassan in October 2024, a few weeks after his flat in Dahieh, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, was destroyed in an Israeli bombing. His wife and children, he said, were now living with three other families in her sister’s cramped apartment elsewhere in the city, while he slept in his car. Hassan had lived all his life in Dahieh. Even now, his car was parked on the edge...
In the 1960s, Lebanese society was divided between those who saw armed resistance against Israel as a national duty and those who believed it would inevitably lead to the country’s destruction. Then, as now, Israel identified that split and widened it.
‘Iused to want to live to avoid your elegy,’ Robert Lowell wrote in ‘For John Berryman’ (included in Day by Day from 1977, the year Lowell died). The poem is subtitled ‘After reading his last “Dream Song”’, by which Lowell meant not number 385 in the 1969 edition of The Dream Songs but the poem that Berryman composed on 5 January 1972, two days...
John Berryman often arrived at lectures and seminars by taxi from whichever rehab clinic was treating him, and afterwards returned there exhausted, his shirt drenched in sweat after delivering his interpretation of Don Quixote, King Lear or the Book of Job. His last poetic thoughts are of disgrace at the podium, of disciplinary action taken against him and of how, if he’s dead, he can’t be fired.
When Lena Dunham became famous in 2012, at 26, for creating, writing, directing and acting in the HBO series Girls, one of the most commented-on aspects of her performance was the fact that she allowed her naked, normal form to be seen on screen. Her body became an argument about Millennial snowflakery, feminist critiques of porn culture and white privilege. It was a time when people said...
Nearly fifteen years after Girls, the way Lena Dunham embodied the character of Hannah Horvath doesn’t seem like a confession, an outrage or a gimmick, but an articulation of girlhood. Through her, we saw a young woman’s power, vulnerability, clumsiness, poignancy, publicness, humour, glory.
In a library when I was young I came across a book published by the Hogarth Press. It was so delicate I hardly wanted to touch it. It had a mottled green cover, it was maybe seventy pages long, and I read it in one amazed hour. The book was Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, from 1920, which the Woolfs would later republish in a fuller volume, with two more of...
Gorky was the designated mourner for a vanished moment in Russian culture. He wanted socialism or democracy but he no longer wanted Bolshevism, which seemed to him psychopathically preoccupied with power. Something was at stake, it was partly Russia, it was partly politics, and it was partly the kind of writing Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev practised – always in pursuit of something they liked to call ‘truth’.
One day in 1982, when I was fourteen years old, I went to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow to look at old newspapers. The room was empty. I checked the indexes and tried to locate a copy of an American paper from twenty years before, 6 August 1962, two days after Marilyn Monroe died in Los Angeles. My parents’ marriage had ended brutally in 1981, I wanted to get my life together and I...
Marilyn Monroe’s image, after Warhol, is still encoded with a vulnerability we instantly recognise, which makes us want to save her or explain her all over again. The real Marilyn has been dust for a long time, but her image has only grown stronger, as if flesh and blood were the illusion all along.
Luis Alvarez gets only a bit part in Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer. In January 1939, the news arrives in Berkeley that two German scientists have split the uranium atom. Oppenheimer, who hasn’t yet heard, sees an excited Alvarez dashing out of a barber shop mid-haircut, newspaper in hand. He catches up with him at the physics department, where they’re joined by...
The Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, transmuted pure theory into mass slaughter, and it changed everything for the scientists who did the work. For Oppenheimer, as its scientific director, it brought first power, then fame, then banishment. For Alvarez, the bomb was a launchpad to a brilliant life as an experimental physicist and counsellor to the Cold War state.
Beryl Bainbridge died in 2010 at the age of 77. Her devotion to cigarettes and whisky meant that she had collected a number of diseases, but she was still working on the last of her eighteen novels, The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress, in her final days. ‘At least I’m trying,’ she wrote to her editor as she sent off another few pages. She was a worker. One of the things she...
Bainbridge chose to be seen as a woman who lived on her own terms, but that wasn’t always the way she felt, and she came to resent the persona she had created for herself. She was an actor before she became a novelist, and her scorn of propriety was in part a performance.
Those who were born in the US in the early 1940s, as I was, came of age in the most buoyant period of the 20th century. In the years between 1945 and 1960, personal income almost tripled. Philip Roth called it the greatest moment of ‘collective inebriation in American history’. After the Great Depression and two world wars, the middle classes were beginning to live...
Sid Caesar’s brand of intelligent laughter – satirical, sketch-driven, character-based, artful – stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. It was ‘like seeing a new country’, Neil Simon said; he was part of Caesar’s legendary writing room before he became Broadway’s most successful comic playwright. ‘All other comics were basically doing situations with farcical characters. Caesar was doing life.’
For a century after the 1789 Revolution, France was admired – or feared – as a source of liberal and progressive ideas. John Stuart Mill hailed the revolution as evidence that ‘democracy’ could become ‘the creed of the nation’. As late as 1914, France was Europe’s most advanced liberal democracy. Unlike in Britain, all men in France could vote, and...
The Marquis de Morès was an extraordinary villain in an epoch crowded with the vile and the louche. After he killed a Jewish officer in a duel in 1892, a prosecutor seeking his conviction for murder captured Morès’s scrappy life of endless reinvention: ‘Cuirassier in Saint-Cyr, meat merchant in Chicago, engineer in Tonkin, reserve second lieutenant in the dragoons, nightstick-major in the streets, marquis in the salons, anarchist in meetings, these are the trappings of ... a destroyer of Jews.’
Early in the first notebook of Jane Austen’s teenage writings is a work entitled ‘Jack and Alice: a novel’; it runs to a little over 5500 words and was probably written between 1789 and 1791. The story is a gleeful demolition of adult nonsense, on most prominent display at a masquerade:
Such was the party assembled in the elegant Drawing Room of Johnson Court, amongst which...
Dror Wahrman argues that ‘it is hard to overestimate – though easy to forget – the cultural significance of the masquerade.’ Devotees of Bridgerton might quibble with ‘easy to forget’: in the TV series the masquerade is a kind of shorthand for an imagined (long) 18th century, just as in Austen’s writing it’s a symbol for all that is ridiculous about the adult world beyond the parlour.
In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Howard Hawks said there was a ‘great fault’ with Bringing Up Baby (1938): ‘There were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball.’ At the helm of these crazies, with Cary Grant’s palaeontologist in tow, is Katharine Hepburn’s Susan, except is she really crazy? Her dialogue has the stamp of the Marx...
Screwballs aren’t miserabilist-humanist comedies about learning to revel in imperfection; they’re comedies of fantasy and will. With enough conviction, craziness starts to make sense.
The world is often just about to end in Sarah Hall’s fiction. In The Carhullan Army (2007), England is in a state of political and ecological collapse. ‘You don’t believe the world can really be broken or that anything terrible will happen during your lifetime,’ the narrator reflects. But the unimaginable soon begins to feel inevitable: ‘You just know when the...
The protagonist of Hall’s latest book is the wind itself. Helm, the only named wind in the British Isles, blows through Cumbria’s Eden Valley, where Hall was raised and where much of her writing, including The Carhullan Army, is set. Like the wind in her short story ‘Then Later, His Ghost’, Helm is now threatened by climate change.
When I lived in Cuba in 2010, more than 80 per cent of the population was employed by the state. The average monthly salary was 480 Cuban pesos (around $20); the basic-rate pension was less than half that. It wasn’t much, but most Cubans own their home and until recently hardly anyone paid rent. Education and healthcare have been free since the revolution; utilities have always been...
In all the years I’ve been going to Cuba, I have never seen such quantities of food and goods on sale as when I visited in 2024 and earlier this year. The problem is not availability, but cost: very few Cubans can afford them.
I arrived to take my exam after half the allotted time had already passed. I hadn’t been delayed by bombing, or even by a power cut, but . . .
With their immortal 0-0 draw against Spain yesterday, Cape Verde have now given me two truly great World Cup moments. On 11 July 2018, I was . . .
Every white Serco prison van that drove into Woolwich Crown Court on Friday morning was met with a cacophony of cheers, applause and ululation . . .
In 2018, when Fifa announced that Mexico, Canada and the USA would host the 2026 World Cup, I thought I’d go to North America for it . . .
John Healey’s resignation as defence secretary is the latest skirmish in a wider campaign to secure an increase in defence spending. Tom . . .
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that we are living under a kind of house arrest, unable to go out, with an oppressive sense that an assault . . .
I’m following the NBA Finals thousands of miles from midtown Manhattan. In my North London flat, I set the alarm for 1.20 a.m. on game . . .
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 . . .
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 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.
In the next issue: Marina Warner on Celia Paul; Jeremy Harding on Sarkozy’s trials.
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