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...
It was our first visit to Kansas City since before the election and the rectory seemed to have grown smaller, darker, dingier. The Trump flag hanging in the alcove where we used to smoke with the seminarian; my father locked in a corner of silence, not seeming to see us. He shot out his own hearing? we gasped. Yes.
Hallie Flanagan: a woman killed by Congress. Or at least by Congress-approved committee. From 1935 to 1939, Flanagan ran the most extraordinary of stage ventures, a dramatic instance of imagination . . .
Enzo Ferrari in his first race, the 1919 Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb. It was hot on the tarmac at Vallelunga, in the low thirties centigrade, though not as hot as it had been 24 hours earlier . . .
Roger Penrose liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out . . .
Biographies of scholars often struggle to do justice to their subjects’ scholarship. Describing the slow, patient exploration of evidence and the stuttering formulation of interpretations need not . . .
This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me.
The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’
Only the hardest heart would repress a twitch of sympathy. To live on the receiving end of so much gush and so much abuse, to be simultaneously spoilt rotten and hopelessly infantilised, how well would any of us stand up to it?
At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. Whenever she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp.
I cannot recall the crucial incident itself, can only remember how I cringed when my parents told me about it, proudly, some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’
I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life. My bedroom is white; white walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds. It’s the best I could do.
Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path, and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his.
Faust, despairing of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some acres from the sea.
When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...
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 the White House by Christopher Hitchens, Jenny Diski, Stephen Greenblatt, Linda Colley, J. Hoberman, David Runciman, Michael Rogin and Colm Tóibín.
Iain Sinclair gives a tour around the area near his home in Hackney, London.
Bee Wilson talks through Alma Mahler’s life, music, relationships and anti-semitism.
Will Self visits Prague for a walking tour in search of Franz Kafka’s genius loci. In the film, Will visits several Kafka sights as part of his research for a digital essay for the LRB, ‘Kafka’s...
Anthony Wilks visits poet George Szirtes to find out about the story of Szirtes’ mother, Magda, a Hungarian photographer who survived two concentration camps and escaped Budapest for England with her...
Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet and wonders why we're talking like this.
In the first of two podcasts, Olivier Roy tells Adam Shatz about his experiences with the Gauche prolétarienne in the 1960s and his early travels in Afghanistan.
In the second part of their conversation, Olivier Roy and Adam Shatz discuss the deculturation of Islam, and why it has led to the radicalisation of so many second-generation immigrants and converts
Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy – ‘the first attribute of God’ – explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church...
The diaries filled me with nostalgia for all the bollocks we had to listen to back in the day; the interminable wrangle about whether women could even do ... um ... art, which in those days was a concept...
You did not need to have met Albert Barnes for him to take against you. In late 1927 Ford Madox Ford, then in New York, telegraphed for permission to visit the foundation. Barnes cabled back: ‘Would...
The story of the Barclay brothers’ rise is ‘the story of modern Britain’, and they were certainly creatures of the 1980s, with their highly leveraged takeovers of old, lumbering companies they would...
In the new memoir as well as in L’Étoile rose Fernandez insists on the political dimension of homosexuality, the obligation it brings to question every value, and expresses disdain for those gay men...
The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed entirely superfluous ogres because ogres are cool. It’s a world of wishes and wonders,...
Masayoshi Son seems compulsively driven to invest larger and larger sums so he can call himself the biggest, most significant, most visionary investor in the world. ‘Bill Gates just started Microsoft...
People love to talk about writers who once had radical sympathies but drifted rightwards with age. But the political evolution of the Peruvian writer and sometime politician Mario Vargas Llosa has been...
Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again,...
For several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity Reagan craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like ‘overripe...
Isherwood wasn’t quite a social novelist, except he was. He wanted opposing parts of society to work together in his books, and these novels offer places where public and private life are seen magically...
Henry VIII’s relationship with his sister was never easy, and not made easier by her ready recourse to long letters that rarely achieved the level of sycophancy Henry expected, and were often written...
To understand the scope of the tragedy of Lisa Marie Presley, and why she couldn’t find her own identity or get out from under the loss of her father, you need to have some understanding of the scope...
The narrator of Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise, presumably, J.D. Vance would have cut all those sentences about the laziness of poor white...
It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...
Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...
It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare,...
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon insisted that women should have the right to a career, for the sake of their souls, their families and society. Was she free to pursue the career she wished for? It would be...
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