Hot, hot, hot . . . very early in the morning, before the factory whistle, but, even at this hour, everything shimmers and quivers under the attack of the white, furious sun already high in the still air.
As I write, the temperature in New York City is 86° F. The relative humidity is 56, the winds are south-westerly at seven mph, visibility stands at six miles. What do those numbers really...
David Benedictus is the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio’s Book at Bedtime. His Sunny Intervals and Showers is ill-suited for late-night reading, since it is not good to have the mind...
Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the...
The last day of June 1858 was a warm day, though not the hottest of that summer. Two weeks earlier the temperature in London had reached 90 degrees, the highest ever recorded. Even so the...
If climate change is not only inevitable but already underway, how are we to live with it?
Childhood memoirs in the LRB archive by Hilary Mantel, Richard Wollheim, Lorna Sage, Edward Said, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Rosemary Dinnage, David Sylvester, Jenny Diski, Sean Wilsey, Lorna Finlayson, Yun Sheng...
Writing about time by David Cannadine, Perry Anderson, Angela Carter, Stanley Cavell, Barbara Everett, Edward Said, John Banville, Rebecca Solnit, David Wootton, Jenny Diski, Malcolm Bull, Andrew O’Hagan...
Writing about science fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Fredric Jameson, Jenny Turner, Tom Shippey, Colin Burrow, Stephanie Burt, Thomas Jones, Margaret Anne Doody, Nick Richardson, Sherry Turkle and Rachel...
Judith Butler on who owns Kafka; Hilary Mantel on royal bodies; Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange; Mary Beard on women in power; Patricia Lockwood on the communal mind of the internet; Meehan Crist...
Writing about mystery, the unintelligible and that for which no words can be found by Jenny Diski, Jacqueline Rose, Adam Phillips, John Lanchester, Alice Spawls and Hal Foster.
Writing about obsolete objects, missing words and anonymous writers by Andrew O’Hagan, Amia Srinivasan, Irina Dumitrescu, Lucia Berlin, Lawrence Rainey and Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Writing about cognitive gaps, stolen artworks and missing the things you never had by Hilary Mantel, Michael Neve, Rosa Lyster, Clancy Martin, James Davidson and Malcolm Gaskill.
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