Mary-Kay Wilmers helped to found the LRB in 1979 and was its editor for many years. Her pieces have been collected as Human Relations and Other Difficulties. She is now the paper’s consulting editor.
Papers speak through their writers. And of all the London Review’s writers Frank Kermode was the one through whom we spoke most often and most eloquently. In all he wrote nearly 250 pieces for the LRB, the first in October 1979, a review of J.F.C. Harrison’s book on millenarianism, the last, in May this year, a review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel...
Betsy Blair, a good friend of the London Review, whose charmed life was recently remembered in the New York Times’s 'The Lives They Led’, died last March. She once wrote a piece for the paper about informers, the FBI, the Hollywood blacklist and what you get when the FBI finally releases your file.
I was looking in the mirror and it occurred to me that jamais un coup de peigne n'abolira le hasard.
‘Hanratty! The name which has haunted the British criminal justice system for a generation is about to hit the headlines again.’ Paul Foot wrote that in the LRB in December 1997. The terrible thing, for people who were the same age as Paul and knew him and liked him, is that he has died and Hanratty hasn’t been proved innocent. Yet.
Paul wrote sixty pieces for the LRB; the...
‘On Good Friday 1984 I found myself laying a wreath at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad. This was to me extraordinary. I belong to the Church of England and have no wish to take sides in the quarrels of Muslims.’ The writer is D.A.N. Jones, who between 1980 and 1992 wrote 64 pieces for this paper and who died on 23 November.
He had arrived in Baghdad the previous...
Mary-Kay Wilmers, who retired as editor of the LRB last month, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her career, first at Faber and Faber, then the Listener, then for 42 years at the London Review of Books....
Stefan Collini talks to Thomas Jones about the life and work of Frank Kermode, and Mary-Kay Wilmers remembers him as a contributor to the LRB.
We look back at 40 years of the LRB in our anniversary event at Conway Hall.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, Andrew O’Hagan and Ben Eastham talk to Sarah Howe about ‘Long-Form Essays in the Digital Age’.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her book The Eitingons, a story of the twentieth century told through the lives of her ancestors: a fur-trader, a psychoanalyst and...
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