In 1928, the V&A acquired a previously unknown portrait. It shows the Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. Fara Dabhoiwala...
The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. This lecture will examine various aspects of that history...
In her LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby explores the ways indigenous artists are reconstructing histories that have been lost or erased, and imagining new futures in a time of imminent catastrophe.
In his LRB Winter Lecture delivered on 28 February 2024, Pankaj Mishra considers the ways in which our moral and political consciousness is profoundly altered when Israel, a country founded as a haven...
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell look at Jane Austen's use of the words 'interest' and 'interesting' and the significance of women reading in her novels in this extract from their podcast series 'On Satire'.
In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence Hogben, a New Zealand-born meteorologist and Royal Navy officer, describes the way this forecasting by committee worked, and why they very nearly chose the...
When Michael Dobson wrote about the printing of Shakespeare’s First Folio for the London Review of Books, he described it as a ‘series of headaches’. When we tried to replicate those 17th century...
In her writing about food for the London Review of Books in the 1980s, Angela Carter found a potent subject for her unique combination of savage wit and political commentary. In this film, Marco Alessi...
Tom Crewe talks about his debut novel, The New Life, which presents a fictionalised account of the lives and loves of John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis, and their collaboration on a revolutionary...
Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed and The Idiot, talks to Merve Emre about her latest novel Either/Or.
Hilary Mantel talks to David Runciman and Helen Thompson from our partner podcast, Talking Politics, as part of our series of events on 'The Power Behind the Throne'.
Jeanette Winterson talks to Victoria Turk about her new book of essays, 12 Bytes, which explores the future of artificial intelligence and what it might mean for the future of humanity.
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