Pieces about Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Jane Boleyn, Christopher Marlowe and other royal bodies, by Hilary Mantel.
I’ve had several official letters recently (including two in one week) telling me to look out because I’m a ‘clinically extremely vulnerable person’. They’re signed by ‘Matt’, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. I’ve tried to explain to Matt’s representatives on earth that I had Covid-19 in the middle of March, that I had a positive antibody test in May and that I’m probably no more vulnerable than he is. But the letters keep coming. I somehow failed to become a statistic last year.
On the evening of the fifteenth day of the seventh month, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, the gates of hell open, disgorging spirits to roam the earth for one night. It’s celebrated . . .
Ionce asked a high-up man in British Rail if he could name the most frightening train journey in the UK. He didn’t hesitate. ‘The last train from Aberdeen to Glasgow on a Friday night,’ . . .
Ian Hamilton once recounted in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in . . .
Who was Barack Obama? The man himself seems troubled by this question and his notably introspective memoir offers up some surprising answers. Was he, for instance, the same person as Dmitry Medvedev . . .
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?
A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: how did I get here? And then the moment passes, and ordinary life closes itself around what had seemed, for a moment, a desperate lack.
Afew weeks ago I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed...
Icannot 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...
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.
Paul de Man was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces...
On a bitter cold morning in January 1939 Auden and Isherwood sailed into New York harbour on board the SS Champlain. After coming through a blizzard off Newfoundland the ship looked like a wedding cake and the mood of our two heroes was correspondingly festive and expectant.
Pieces about Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Jane Boleyn, Christopher Marlowe and other royal bodies, by Hilary Mantel.
Writing about the House of Windsor by Paul Foot, Glen Newey, Jenny Diski, William Empson, Bee Wilson, Thomas Jones, Caroline Murphy, Rosemary Hill, Ferdinand Mount and Hilary Mantel.
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...
Iain Sinclair gives a tour around the area near his home in Hackney, London.
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.
Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet and wonders why we're talking like this.
Bee Wilson talks through Alma Mahler’s life, music, relationships and anti-semitism.
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...
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
A bright winter’s day, the journey south across the Thames on the top deck of a number 4 bus, the walk along Lower Marsh towards the great naval guns at the Imperial War Museum’s entrance....
28 April. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should think: ‘Here is somebody who knows what it is like to be me.’ It’s not what E.M. Forster meant by ‘only connect,’...
Today, Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including some historians, consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end. In a note written shortly...
Perhaps the great women artists are nocturnal creatures who prefer to create freely in the darkness. In this way, too, they avoid being referred to as ‘one of these neurotics’. Perhaps...
Sasha Swire has lived her whole life in the densely interconnected world of Conservative Party politics, and her decision to publish her diaries, as well as transcripts of private text and WhatsApp messages...
Peter had just reached the top of the third page (‘poor Darling!’) when the war reasserted itself and he had to break off. The letter continues on 19 February – the beginning of the end...
To have one brother killed by an African animal would be a misfortune. To lose two, at different times, is surely remarkable. Such was the distinction of Sir Edward Grey, who served as foreign secretary...
‘You’re not the only one,’ a friend assured me, and sent me screenshots of other people who couldn’t change their dresses or remove their ties until the official call came. At best,...
What did Kissinger do in power that has given him such an extraordinary afterlife? He was a consummate showman, a master of the on-the-record and the off-the-record briefing, a darling of the paparazzi,...
Ernest Bevin’s vigorous scepticism and his quick understanding of what other people were actually like – a rare quality in politicians, that race of incurable solipsists – went with an...
I am the feminist killjoy of Caitlin Moran’s nightmares, scratching my biroed objections all over the book, making a reading list for her in my head. She wrote her first book to eliminate people...
Stosslüften requires that a window be opened wide at least once a day to give a room a thorough blast; querlüften needs crosscurrents of air, which means windows open at opposite...
The life of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale is played out against office gossip, the views from windows, ‘the noise of type-writers’, the business of the day. If, as Eliot told her, a letter...
Since China tamed the virus and normal life resumed, the CCP has bestowed its highest honours on key scientists and doctors. Political commentators, like middle-class consumers, are in high spirits. The...
Ideal for snoopers, snipers, novelists, cartoonists and daydreamers, squares offer the chance of peering out in several directions without someone across from you peering back. They mix urbanity and...
Fish sleep with their eyes open: not our kind of sleep, more like our kind of daydream. Awake but not awake, just like me; living to eat and conserve energy, just like me; devoid of answers, just like...
Of all the ‘different varieties of New Jerusalem ... I’d only return to one,’ Gunn wrote, ‘For the sexual New Jerusalem was by far the greatest fun.’ ‘He was very interested...
I had just arrived in the town of Tapachula in the southern state of Chiapas, not far from the Guatemalan border, when I heard that a boat had capsized. On the morning of 11 October, a fisherman had spotted...
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