Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures – interventionist, statist and protectionist – that are anathema to its doctrine, yet without losing its grip on the minds of policymakers, or giving way to any coherent alternative vision of the way an advanced capitalist economy should be run.
In the late 16th century, a stream of Greek émigrés passed through the south German university town of Tübingen. After recounting the indignities they had suffered (or claimed to have suffered) under
In November 1885, Friedrich Engels published an essay in the Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse
AChinese friend and I have taken to batting words at each other like ping-pong balls. I’m trying to improve my Mandarin and she is curious about Bengali, but some things stop us in our tracks. Rice
‘The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.’ The subtitle of Sergey Radchenko’s book makes it sound like an aspirant bestseller from the height of America’s Red Scare. But don’t be misled
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
In the summer of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. The massacre has long been studied but its causes remain misunderstood. Muslims, Jews and Christians of
Joséphine Bonaparte and Térézia Tallien developed a new way of dressing that freed the body and redrew the female figure. The result was a high-waisted, one-piece dress in a light fabric, worn without
Victor Serge’s self-conscious marginality, the cause of enormous struggle during his life, became a posthumous badge of authenticity: it helped reassure countless liberals and leftists that one could
Christ himself made barely any pronouncements condemning sexuality. This has not stood in the way of Church authorities’ lavish condemnation of all sorts of human desire.
With contemporary English including more than eighty thousand terms of French origin, Georges Clemenceau might have had a point when he argued that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just
The will to colonise has not disappeared. Russia seeks to recolonise Ukraine. Israel relentlessly appropriates Palestinian land. Trump speaks of ‘reclaiming’ Canada, Greenland. The conditions that
The point of the show isn’t to prove that reproductions fail to do justice to the original. The curators argue instead that reproductions have much to tell us about the production of art-historical
Hamas had been able to take power in Gaza because Israel had failed to circumscribe Palestinian politics within the Oslo boundaries. But in the event, Hamas was useful to Israel’s larger strategy of occupation.
Five thousand Leningraders died of distrofia on Christmas Day 1941. One of them was Aleksandr Shchukin, a 58-year-old botanist found dead at his desk at the All Union Institute of Plant Breeding just
No one who has lived in Britain would contest that Oxfam (and Save the Children, War on Want, Live Aid and the other big aid campaigns and organisations) did matter a lot: they don’t need to be credited
No doubt, some individuals have always pulled levers behind the scenes to benefit themselves and their families financially. But the authors of Born to Rule have no evidence that the inheritors of old
The Great Transformation was an exceptionally bold effort to make sense of contemporary developments on an international scale by telling a quasi-historical story that linked the spinning jenny, Malthus
James VI and I called the first duke of Buckingham ‘Steenie’ – short for St Stephen, who, it was said, had the face of an angel. Buckingham called James his ‘dear dad and husband’, and himself
From frescoes and printed devotional images to incised amulets, moulded gingerbread and the stamped Eucharistic host, a wide variety of images has, at various moments in Western history, seemed worthy
Perry Anderson brings a peculiar gift to the work of criticism: he can step into a book and inspect it closely, even sympathetically, scrutinising its structures, immersing himself in its style and atmosphere
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
An ocean-going navy is not a workaday public service, like a coastguard or a constabulary. It is a grand project, an ambition, a national glory or a national shame. Its power is hard-gained and fragile
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.