Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His books include Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World and Mother Country, a memoir. His essay collection, Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination, is due in March 2026.
After Brigitte Bardot’s death in December, the editorial in Paris-Match was desolate: the country had lost ‘its wife, its daughter, its mother, its confidante … its conscience, its Marianne’; French cinema had ‘faded’, no one would again embody ‘liberty and beauty’ as she had; ‘tears will flow.’ Bardot was one of France’s...
Balfour with Jewish settlers in 1925.
Fifteen years ago I was asked by a young Palestinian student at a meeting in Jenin whether, as a British subject, I felt responsible for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Perhaps it was the translator who introduced the idea of personal responsibility, when the young woman who put the question meant historical. In any case, that’s how I...
The idea that France should be shut down by popular consensus, as a protest against the budget proposals of Macron’s prime minister François Bayrou, and above all against Macron himself, was launched on a Telegram account in July. At the time, Bayrou was failing to drive an austerity budget through the National Assembly. He was preoccupied by the country’s annual deficit and so was Brussels: it was running at 5.8 per cent of GDP, well above the 3 per cent limit set by the EU’s stability and growth pact, which France has crashed for years. Voters on the left and the far right didn’t like Bayrou’s proposed cuts in public provision.
‘Couple dans une gare parisienne’ (1959)
In 1959, the French monthly Réalités ran a piece by Bernard Frank, a precocious novelist and former protégé of Sartre, explaining that a lost generation of young bourgeois had found their bearings in existentialism. Post-occupation and post-Vichy, he argued, the model hero was an impoverished intellectual, the...
An hour into the galleries of the Africa Museum in Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels, you come to Tonga, a startling piece by Nada Tshibwabwa, a Congolese artist and musician. It’s made from recycled mobile phone waste and is roughly the size of a ceremonial mask designed to fit a human head. Tshibwabwa was an artist in residence at the museum in 2022 and his work is now part of...
Jeremy Harding talks to Tom about the long and resilient reign of King Hassan II of Morocco, and its repressive measures, as described in a new book by Aziz BineBine, who suffered 18 years of brutal detention...
Jeremy Harding discusses the politics of migration.
Elaine Mokhtefi talks to Jeremy Harding about her time working in Algeria in the 1960s when she met Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
In his latest book Heaven on Earth art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. He talks to LRB contributing editor...
Jeremy Harding and Adam Shatz look back at their pieces for the LRB reporting from North Africa and the Middle East.
Jeremy Harding examines the work of Malian portrait photographer Seydou Keïta and the lively collaboration between himself and his sitters in the years before Mail’s independence.
Jeremy Harding talks about the politics of migration and the battle at Europe’s borders.
‘In olden times, which is when God was deciding what blessings he would give to the countries he was creating, after a long while he finally got to Angola and he asked Gabriel his angel to...
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