The Editors

Fredric Jameson died yesterday at the age of 90. He had taught since 1985 at Duke University. His many books include The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Antinomies of Realism (reviewing which, Michael Wood observed that ‘Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does’).

As Miranda Carter writes in the current issue of the LRB, more than 2360 episodes of Desert Island Discs are available as podcasts. ‘This audio archive is unique,’ Carter says. ‘Before your ears thousands of famous and no longer famous people talk about themselves. Over seventy years, the language with which we describe ourselves, and expectations about what it’s acceptable to reveal in the public realm, are audibly mapped.’ Some of the programme’s guests have also contributed to the London Review of Books. They include, in chronological order:

Partners in Health, the charity he cofounded in 1987, has announced that Paul Farmer died today in Rwanda. He was a professor of global health at Harvard and an infectious disease physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The most recent of his many books was Fever, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History. He also wrote four pieces for the LRB: on the coup that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti; on Ebola (twice); and on global healthcare inequality.

It’s ten years since Christopher Logue died. His archive was recently acquired by the British Library and there’s going to be an event on Sunday afternoon, The Arrival of the Poet in the Library: A Celebration of Christopher Logue, with Tariq Ali, John Hegley, Rosemary Hill, Christopher Reid, Harriet Walter and Astrid Williamson, hosted by Andrew O’Hagan. It also marks the publication of the audiobook of War Music: The Author’s Own Recording. As August Kleinzahler wrote in the LRB, Logue’s ‘considerable work in theatre and film as actor, playwright and screenwriter nourished the poetry, much of which was dramatic in nature, and also helped make him one of his generation’s finest readers of verse’. You can listen to him reading an extract from Book 19 here.

Dawn Foster’s books will go on sale at Housmans Bookshop in King's Cross from 11 o'clock tomorrow morning (Saturday 16 October). All the books are stamped ‘Dawn Foster Forever – From the library of Dawn Foster 1986-2021’, and are priced £1, £3 or £5.

W.G. Runciman, who died on 10 December, wrote 32 pieces for the LRB. The first, ‘On the State of the Left’, a review of The Forward March of Labour Halted? by Eric Hobsbawm, Ken Gill and Tony Benn, appeared in December 1981. The last, in January 2016, was a Diary about the regulation of the City of London. Others were on less serious (or should that be no less serious) subjects such as a review of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, published on 1 April 1983, which begins with an account of Malinowski’s anthropological method and goes on to consider its application to the inhabitants of SW3.

The documentary photographer Chris Killip has died at the age of 74. Best known for In Flagrante, his series of photographs taken in England’s deindustrialising north-east between 1973 and 1985, and published in a book in 1988, he also provided cover photographs for 19 issues of the LRB.

The Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses has been won by Fitzcarraldo Editions for Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s novel Animalia, translated from French by Frank Wynne. Because of Covid-19, the £10,000 prize money this year is being divided equally between all the shortlisted publishers.

Archive footage of Alan Bennett and the late Jonathan Miller in their early careers as Oxford philosophers:

In the latest episode of the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman, Charles Arthur and Jennifer Cobbe talk about the impact of different online platforms on the general election campaign, from Twitter and Facebook to WhatsApp and TikTok. Is micro-targeting getting more sophisticated? Is viral messaging getting more important? Or are traditional electioneering techniques still driving voter engagement? They also ask if there's any scope left for a 'December surprise'.