On the evening of 16 October, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron were filmed from the stalls as they danced in a private box at a Céline Dion concert in Nanterre. Macron appeared a little guarded, but Brigitte was animated, clapping and waving her arms, her head bobbing up and down. ‘The dates match up,’ read the caption of a social media post that went viral the following...
The call to mobilisation began to spread at the start of September: first on TikTok, then across social media platforms via AI-generated graphics announcing ‘le retour des gilets jaunes’. The date has political resonance: on 17 October 1961, Maurice Papon ordered the Police Nationale to attack Algerians protesting in support of the FLN. This time, graffiti across Paris read: ‘Nous sommes les descendants des Algériens que vous n’avez pas noyés.’
It can be hard to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. In The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), David Brion Davis showed that from classical antiquity slavery received ‘the highest sanction’ from both religion and philosophy. Aristotle made an especially influential...
It can be hard to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. Seneca was a rare dissenter. In his 47th letter to Lucilius, he wrote: ‘Remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled on by the same skies and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies.’
Amid the tear-gas fumes and flying stun grenades it was easy to miss the ceremony taking place on the Pont Saint-Michel on Saturday, 17 October. A group of French-Algerians threw flowers into the Seine to mark the 65th anniversary of the worst police massacre in Europe since the Second World War.
Amid the tear-gas fumes and flying stun grenades it was easy to miss the ceremony taking place on the Pont Saint-Michel on Saturday, 17 October. A group of French-Algerians threw flowers into the Seine to mark the 65th anniversary of the worst police massacre in Europe since the Second World War.
Roy Cohn has been dead for forty years, but Donald Trump still yearns for him, his first lawyer and his fiercest. Who else could take an attack meant for Trump and return it a thousand – a million! – times harder? He still sometimes calls out for him: ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ No one was better at making him feel indefeasible. The gossip columnist Cindy Adams...
Roy Cohn has been dead for forty years, but Donald Trump still yearns for him, his first lawyer and his fiercest. Who else could take an attack meant for Trump and return it a thousand – a million! – times harder? He still sometimes calls out for him: ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ No one was better at making him feel indefeasible.
Ifirst met Fredric Jameson more than forty years ago, at one of the sociology of literature conferences at Essex University in the early 1980s. I can’t remember which one, but I know that in July 1982 I gave a talk called ‘Sexual/Textual Politics’. Was Fred there that year? I had recently completed a PhD at Bergen, a university few in England had heard of, and was trying...
Fredric Jameson seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins.
Thirty years ago, well before the advent of Google Street View, I heard about a philosopher invited as a visiting professor to the University of Edinburgh who was thrilled to learn that his office would be in David Hume Tower. Picturing a fortified keep adorned with stepped gables and corbelled turrets, he was sorely disappointed on arrival to discover that the tower was a fourteen-storey...
Whereas in the 18th century David Hume’s irreligion made him a bogeyman, now it is his views on race that have tarnished his reputation. Most obviously, we observe here the shifting parameters of what a society finds unacceptable. However, behind these controversies lurks a much deeper connection between religion and race.
In the last two years, my friends in the Chinese artificial intelligence industry have stopped talking about the singularity. No matter how you define it, we are either already in it or about to be there. If Elon Musk is right (though he did predict we’d be living on Mars by now), AI will surpass the sum of all human intelligence in five years and exceed human control within ten....
As a lazy writer and an even lazier translator, I have found myself without much work in recent years. Five years ago, I was quite confident that AI couldn’t replace human translators. Now, I am forced to admit that only a small amount of the writing we produce requires or deserves a human translator.
In the days leading up to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February, the prediction market Kalshi set up a trade, a wager in all but name, on the Yes/No proposition that the disgraced Republican ex-congressman George Santos would attend. The larger the number of people who bet ‘Yes’ (or, in the language the prediction markets prefer, bought ‘Yes’...
Beneath a list of current bets on whether there will be a coup in this or that country by a certain date, Polymarket answers the FAQ ‘Why use Polymarket for coup predictions?’ with the response: ‘It cuts through the noise. You get an unbiased view of what thousands of traders think will actually happen, often more accurate than polls.’
Confronted by an obituary tribute to some person I’ve known and valued, I often think of the value J.H. Prynne placed on delivering extempore but pre-plotted eulogies for those who meant most to him. His fellow student and neophyte poet at Jesus College, Cambridge, R.F. Langley, accomplice in church visiting and European travels. His sparring partner and correspondent Ed Dorn. His...
Among the warring tribe of unsponsored fundamentalist poets, a full flush of broadsheet obituaries – the Times, Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times – is a light-deflecting singularity. But there are special cases. As if to make recompense for the substantial reviews they never delivered, the major culprits gave generous space to Prynne, who died, aged 89, on 22 April.
Emma Cline is an entertainer. Her first book, The Girls (2016), was a sensational reimagining of the Manson Family from the point of view of Evie, a 14-year-old who becomes entangled with the group. She’s not mesmerised by the guru figure, Russell, so much as by his harem – the long-haired, slightly scuzzy, dumpster-diving, shoplifting, insouciant ‘girls’. It is...
The title, Switzy, is a flippant nickname for Switzerland, a place like old age: snow-topped, dim and cold. Emma Cline’s novel hums with luxury: the private plane, the voguish hotels and restaurants, the limousine. And yet those pristine spaces end up merging seamlessly with the institutional nihility of the euthanasia clinic.
In 1963 Shelagh Delaney published a story based on the hate mail and begging letters she received when A Taste of Honey made her famous. ‘It is probably fair to say that it is one of the best plays ever written by a 19-year-old photographer’s assistant. But … she knows as much about adult behaviour as she does about elephants’; ‘Will you lend me...
Shelagh Delaney had written A Taste of Honey when she was nineteen; it took her ten days. It was staged by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1958 and filmed by Tony Richardson in 1961. She had a cushion of money; she had critical acclaim: Graham Greene proclaimed her to be as ‘fresh’ as John Osborne and (not a very high bar) more ‘mature’.
Ralph Ellison described Invisible Man as an account of his narrator’s movement from ‘purpose to passion to perception’, terms borrowed from the critic Kenneth Burke. By the time Ellison began writing the book, in the summer of 1945, he believed that anyone could gain a clearer mind, but only through an encounter with failure or anguish. According to the Greek proverb...
If Invisible Man risked a too easy transcending of the pain it described, fulfilling one half of the ‘tragicomic’ or ‘blues’ formula but stinting on the other, Ralph Ellison’s essays went much further. One of his oddest rhetorical manoeuvres was to emphasise resilience while at the same time minimising adversity. There was so much silver lining in Ellison’s account of African American history that the cloud is barely visible.
‘The Flight out of Egypt’ (1849-50).
Richard Dadd ’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, a highlight of the retrospective at the Royal Academy (until 25 October), seems reluctant to give up its secrets. The lighting is crepuscular; tall grass stems stripe the foreground; veined, juicy-looking leaves curtain off the top-right corner. The eye is caught at first...
The Royal Academy’s exhibition sets out to show that there is more to Richard Dadd than the mad artist away with the fairies. Had he not been an inmate of Bedlam then Broadmoor, he would have been, perhaps, a Pre-Raphaelite. Instead, he pursued his own course, developing a visionary style laden with mysterious personal symbolism and private jokes.
‘Pumpkin with a Stable Lad’ by George Stubbs (1774).
The Yale Centre for British Art, which reopened in the spring of 2025 after being closed for two years (as part of a renovation project costing $16.5 million), is home to the largest collection of British art outside the UK. Its holdings, which span the 15th century to the present day, include around 2500 paintings...
The Yale Centre for British Art is home to the largest collection of British art outside the UK. At the museum’s core is a foundational gift of works from Paul Mellon, who used his banking fortune to breed racehorses and acquire beautiful objects. ‘As anyone who has started to collect anything knows,’ he wrote, ‘it is impossible to stop.’
On 13 August, Donald Trump’s paper ballot for the Republican Party primaries in Florida arrived at the offices of the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections; it was the second vote he had cast by mail this year. America’s many elections, including the House and Senate races, are thoroughly local affairs. Each state has its own election rules, and a county or a municipal...
Driving from Kenosha to Racine to Janesville to Milwaukee, I’m conscious that the rules for early voting, absentee ballots, drop boxes (where you put your completed postal vote) and election timetables change every few miles. This fragmentation makes it hard for anyone, even a president unwilling to countenance his party losing, to rig election outcomes. But localisation also creates problems.
Skateboarders see the world in their own way. They have a unique appreciation for aspects of architecture that otherwise go unloved or overlooked, and their unorthodox investigations of the postwar built environment constitute the most detailed and intimate engagement with modern urbanism made by any social group. Who else has searched out and realised the potential of the least promising...
In the years before the Southbank Centre finally managed to nobble it, the Undercroft was still a free, undetermined space. It wasn’t controllable, it wasn’t set aside, it wasn’t closed off to spectators and passers-by. It was a truly public place, and it had been found, claimed and occupied by skateboarders; in law it was the Southbank Centre’s property, but it also wasn’t anybody’s, and we definitely made it ours.
Among John Clare’s drawings of ‘pootys’ (snail shells) and birds is a doodle of his imagined tombstone. It bears the inscription: ‘HERE Rest the HOPES and Ashes of JOHN CLARE.’ The masons missed the memo. Clare’s actual memorial, erected after his death in 1864, reads ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, borrowing the epithet from the title page...
Clare was born in 1793 in the village of Helpston in Northamptonshire. When the bookseller Ned Drury met him in 1819, he immediately saw an opportunity to market him as a ‘peasant poet’. Describing Clare in a letter to the publisher John Taylor, Drury wrote: ‘He is low in stature ... ungaitly – awkward – is a fiddler – loves ale – likes the girls – somewhat idle – hates work.’
‘Cut Meringues’ by Wayne Thiebaud (1961).Courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.
In a statement to accompany the accession of Cut Meringues by the Museum of Modern Art following his first New York exhibition in 1962, Wayne Thiebaud suggested that each era produces its own still life. Rather than the props and evidences of discreetly arranged...
Desire is the great leveller in these pictures, and Wayne Thiebaud’s Boston cremes or pumpkin pie slices are like close-ups in the movies. They make us swoon. Even alone in a room with one of his small canvases, the viewer is a ‘We’ rather than an ‘I’.
Amid the tear-gas fumes and flying stun grenades it was easy to miss the ceremony taking place on the Pont Saint-Michel on Saturday, 17 October . . .
My mother rang to say that my father had called a water truck owner and offered to pay him to fill our jerry cans, but the man said his truck . . .
My boss at the bookshop has said he would sell AI novels if there were clear demand and clear labelling. We almost certainly already sell books . . .
At the first interval in the Berlin Staatsoper’s new production of La Vestale, the man to my right turned to me and said: ‘Mein . . .
Jordan Bardella was supposed to be a different kind of far-right French politician: young, technically savvy, a long way from the poisonous . . .
Lula raised the budget for school lunches, improved access to higher education and free medication, and increased the hiring of public health . . .
Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. She first appeared in the London Review on the letters page in 1993. The first poems . . .
There were still several gendarmerie vans parked near Lycée Hélène Boucher in the 20th arrondissement at noon on Tuesday . . .
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...
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