Short Cuts: Libel Tourism

Peter Geoghegan, 16 March 2023

If you have enough money, even being sanctioned by the British government is no impediment to using London’s courts to silence your critics. The Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 explicitly...

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What might it mean​ for the way we think about abortion if we take seriously the problem of what fictional narrative – novels and stories and films – says about it, or doesn’t say, what it makes...

Read more about Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion: The Abortion Plot

Christ in Purple Silk: Medieval Selfhood

Irina Dumitrescu, 2 March 2023

Medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well...

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Against America

Barclay Bram, 2 March 2023

When Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979, images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must...

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Against boiled cabbage: Falling for Vivekananda

Michael Ledger-Lomas, 2 February 2023

Vivekananda might have styled himself as an avatar of timeless Eastern wisdom, but he was a creature of steam trains and ocean liners. In the years between his appearance at the World’s Parliament of...

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Diary: In Bamako

Rahmane Idrissa, 2 February 2023

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mali was the poster child of democratisation in Africa. It is now seen as the West’s biggest disappointment on the continent. It has experienced three coups in a decade...

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Diary: At the Deportation Tribunal

Luke de Noronha, 19 January 2023

The government recognises the possibility of persecution by a foreign state, organised criminal groups or people traffickers. But for the many people let down and mistreated by institutions of the British...

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Panel Problems

Anna McGee, 5 January 2023

Jacopo’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece was too large and cumbersome to fit onto a single wall in its original, three-tier configuration. For almost thirty years, the panels were arranged across two walls,...

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Somewhere in the Web: Uyghur Identity

Michael Dillon, 5 January 2023

Official Chinese publications emphasise the multiethnic and multicultural character of Xinjiang, but no one who spends time there can be in any doubt that Islam dominates Uyghur society. At the root of...

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Rejoicings in a Dug-Out: Cecil, Ada and G.K.

Peter Howarth, 15 December 2022

Everyone who knew G.K. Chesterton loved him for his kindliness and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s...

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Short Cuts: Lawless v. Ireland

Tormod Johansen, 17 November 2022

The​ European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg delivered its first judgment on 1 July 1961. Gerard Richard Lawless had been arrested four years earlier while attempting to travel from...

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Relentlessly Rational: The Treason Trial

Stephen Sedley, 22 September 2022

The future Justice Edwin Cameron, watching Sydney Kentridge’s defence in the trial of the dean of Johannesburg under the Terrorism Act, witnessed a cross-examination that was ‘meticulously detailed,...

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Bastilles and Battalions: On Rikers Island

Sarah Resnick, 22 September 2022

Rikers was constructed to replace the grim complex of jails and asylums on Blackwell’s Island (now called Roosevelt Island); and Blackwell’s too was built to replace an older discredited jail. Again...

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Trial’s End

Madeleine Schwartz, 21 July 2022

It didn’t take long for the French press to notice that many of the men did not fit the stereotype of someone who has been radicalised, which in French popular understanding tends to entail fervent religious...

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LRB contributors

LRB Contributors, 21 July 2022

Elif Batuman, Edna Bonhomme, Hazel V. Carby, Linda Colley, Meehan Crist, Anne Enright, Lorna Finlayson, Lisa Hallgarten and Jayne Kavanagh, Sophie Lewis, Maureen N. McLane, Erin Maglaque,

Read more about After Roe v. Wade

Jane Roe hardly appears in the judicial opinion that granted Americans the right to abortion ‘free of interference by the state’. Her anonymity, her everywomanishness, suited the court fine: Roe was...

Read more about A Piece of Pizza and a Beer: Who was Jane Roe?

Doors close, backs turn: Why complain?

Lorna Finlayson, 12 May 2022

The crisis facing higher education in the UK is not an excuse for delaying action on sexual violence. If we wait to save the university first, we may well wait for ever. For that reason, though, it’s...

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While orthodox Marxists had long argued that the purpose of racism was to divide workers, Black and white workers in South Africa already had different relations to capital. Apartheid racism was essential...

Read more about Resistance from Elsewhere: Black Marxism