In 1989, the Soviet historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, well known to readers of the LRB, was on a plane when the passenger next to her struck up a conversation. She’d been watching him write...
Marginal illustrations depict, with faintly comic Ladybird book fidelity, the metaphorical events of the adjoining poem: Petrarch shot through the heart by an arrow; Petrarch metamorphosing into a laurel...
At the end of the 1960s, just as the Troubles were starting, I learned to drive in a blue Volkswagen on the minor roads criss-crossing the Irish border, my father on tenterhooks in the...
At a time when relations between Russia and the West are at such a low ebb, it can be easy to forget exactly how much the two sides agree on. This is especially true in the realm of economic...
In April 2014 I was asked to represent a man called Gurpal Virdi. The last time I had heard that name was ten years earlier at a memorial service for my father, Paul Foot, at the Hackney Empire. There,...
Elizabeth Holmes was said to be the ‘youngest self-made female billionaire’ of all time. And why not? Her invention was going to be the reason people – Americans first, but eventually everyone in...
Fifteen years ago, on one of my early visits to Pyongyang, I was taken to the Tower of the Juche Idea, the vertiginous propaganda monument on the south bank of the Taedong River. Peering...
The moped glides along a road lined with palm trees. If you touch the screen, the moped jumps, looping through the air. Points are scored by vaulting over upcoming palm trees and clipping...
What is at risk of being lost amid all the turkey stuffing is that Saul Bellow was a witty writer, as much a snappy dresser in prose as he was splashed out in his slick duds, a cool operator and crafty...
The canteens at Peking University offer dishes from China’s many culinary traditions: vegetable noodles spiced with chilli and Sichuan peppercorns, whole carp braised in soy sauce, fried...
We hardly notice the railway until in the early afternoon we are in the cloisters and a train sounds its horn, which, echoing round the Gothic arches, sounds like the Last Trump.
‘I’ve been told that nobody sings the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in...
I used to lose several items a week. It was to do with being young, part of the psychopathology of everyday life, then it stopped. Maybe you stop losing small things around the time you...
The Medieval English Economic History paper was the one I looked forward to least. Sure enough, when I glanced at the list of questions I realised that of the three I had to answer one would...
Awake at 4 a.m. when the sleeping pills wear off, she finds a voice and writes the poems of her life, ones that will make her a myth like Lazarus, like Lorelei. But now she knows that her conception of...
The present queen was not the only person to feel, when her grandmother Queen Mary died in 1953, that she ‘could not imagine a world without her’. The ‘old queen’, as...
It takes about three days. Then you start dreaming about Kim Jong-un. At Beijing airport, waiting for the Air Koryo flight to Pyongyang, you notice men arriving at the gate in cheap shoes and...
‘The subtlest of insults to Scotland is, it seems, to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the...