‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious...
America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’ Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War, there has been one battle after another, both inside America itself, and over the idea of America and its role in the world.
Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his...
Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right?
The street violence endemic to the city of Rome had been growing steadily worse for years and because of it, early in 52 BC, the great orator Marcus Tullius Cicero was facing a nasty challenge in a career that had been full of them: how to defend a murderer who openly admitted to the killing and, worse, how to do it when the victim was Cicero’s worst enemy, Publius Clodius Pulcher. A...
Trying to psychoanalyse historical figures is rarely productive, but Cicero was a type we can all recognise. He had a huge but exceedingly brittle ego which could seesaw from self-regard to self-loathing, and from elation to despondency, with alarming speed.
The destruction of Palestinian lives is now a base line in a holding pattern. The ferocious white heat of the past two years of unrelenting attacks has receded from view, but the genocide continues. There is far less coverage on social media, where my accounts are instead filled with requests for aid.
The destruction of Palestinian lives is now a base line in a holding pattern. The ferocious white heat of the past two years of unrelenting attacks has receded from view, but the genocide continues. There is far less coverage on social media, where my accounts are instead filled with requests for aid.
The World Economic Forum in Davos is ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and the rise of a new global order in which bullies rule like kings. This must all sound extremely odd to the Indigenous people of Canada, America, Australia or Greenland, for whom that old order meant only catastrophe.
The World Economic Forum in Davos is ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and the rise of a new global order in which bullies rule like kings. This must all sound extremely odd to the Indigenous people of Canada, America, Australia or Greenland, for whom that old order meant only catastrophe.
Xi Jinping has been at the top of China’s political system for thirteen years. In that time he has consolidated control over the apparatus of the Chinese state and personalised power to a degree unseen since the death of Mao. Like Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin before him, Xi is general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, chairman of the Central Military Commission and head of state....
China, which in the post-Cold War period was viewed as either lunch for American capital or an irredeemable dungeon, has acquired under Xi Jinping a third face in the West as a powerful threat to the American empire.
One of the fabulous stories that unfolds at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, the Paris apartment building at the centre of Georges Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual, concerns an Englishman called Percival Bartlebooth. While he is still youngish, Bartlebooth – heir to money enough to live as an idle aristocrat – decides to dedicate himself and his fortune to a peculiar...
Does anything matter if we’re done for? We are not the first to wonder. Contemporary fictions are preoccupied with apocalypse, human extinction and cataclysm, but this is nothing new. Secular eschatology is young compared to its millennial Christian variations, but it still has a history two centuries long.
Yeats wrote ‘Cuchulain Comforted’ in the South of France on 13 January 1939, fifteen days before he died. In the poem, the implacable warrior has ‘six mortal wounds’. As he nears death, he moves among the shades. He is the same solitary figure we know from an early Yeats poem, the warrior who ‘fought with the invulnerable tide’, and from plays such as At...
Who was English; who was American? If Auden was English, was T.S. Eliot American? Or was it the other way around? Eliot’s own reply in 1953 was: ‘I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “Whichever Auden is, I suppose, I must be the other.”’
For thirteen years Britney Spears lived under a conservatorship, a legal arrangement in which every aspect of her life was controlled by her father. She couldn’t spend her own money, drive her own car, write a cheque, change her setlist, get a manicure, take vitamins for her hair, remove her IUD or drink coffee. Jamie Spears had the power to enter his daughter into new contracts, make...
Britney’s career began with the plausible deniability of her schoolgirl sex appeal and stalled with the refusal of her right to make adult choices: no Vegas weddings, no drugged-up partying, no sex before marriage, no making yourself ugly on purpose. ‘At what point,’ she asks, ‘did I promise to stay seventeen for the rest of my life?’
One regular theme of the reports that came out of Trump’s first administration was that no matter how bad it looked on the surface, it was even worse behind the scenes. The long-standing Trump-watcher Michael Wolff, who positioned himself as tittle-tattle-in-chief during those years, wrote a series of books – Fire and Fury, Siege, Landslide – describing the endless...
Normally, being revealed as a hypocrite is kryptonite for a politician running for office. But Harris doesn’t know what to do with Trump’s tricksy personality because it doesn’t fit the mould. Was she meant to tell people that he’s not as bad as he looks or that he couldn’t be trusted because he might be capable of empathy?
Acharacter in Josh Safdie’s new film, Marty Supreme, says there are no second chances in this world. The remark is meant to sound tough and true, if a little worn out. In fact, although the character may be right about many places in reality, he couldn’t be more wrong about the world of this movie. Everyone has dozens of chances, and everyone screws up most of them.
Marty Supreme...
Most of the characters in Marty Supreme believe their lives are a kind of movie, and when a character speaks of ‘theatre’ he is not talking about a building but about the agitated world he lives in. But then how do you make a good movie about an imagined bad movie?
‘Who’s Afraid of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya?’ was the title of an essay that appeared in a Russian émigré literary journal in 1984. Petrushevskaya’s stories – short tales of doomed romance and family conflict set within cramped Soviet apartments – were domestic, small-scale, so why weren’t they being published? By 2009, things had...
‘Who’s afraid of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya?’ was the title of an essay that appeared in a Russian émigré literary journal in 1984. Petrushevskaya’s stories – short tales of doomed romance and family conflict set within cramped Soviet apartments – were domestic, small-scale, so why weren’t they being published?
The man on the canvas stands five foot four, in other words nearly life size. You stand no further away from him, to judge from the angle at which you view the dog at his feet. The two as it were confront you. You can almost smell him, this weathered blind beggar. You can almost hear him: his hollering, his hurdy-gurdy’s abrasive dense drone. And you are watched – but...
Georges de La Tour’s scan of the visual field is a stark, bold testing out of basic facets of experience. What is it to face another human, when that person cannot see you? What are humans if not tall bipeds, with heads that dangle above a distant ground?
Gurnaik Johal’s admirable first novel starts with a piece of miraculous regeneration. Satnam, a Londoner, visits Punjab for the first time since childhood to scatter his grandmother’s ashes (this is East Punjab, on the Indian side of the border, predominantly Sikh). He looks down into the old well on the family farm – dry for many decades – and is surprised to see...
More than one variety of omniscience is on show in Saraswati. What is referred to as an omniscient narrator is usually one able to slip in and out of the minds of a modest number of characters, something we are unable to do away from the page, although literature makes it seem some sort of birthright. This is empathy in action, though exempt from the possibility of contradiction.
Art historians were once preoccupied with periodisation. In the 20th century, Fra Angelico’s work, which spans the late 1410s to the early 1450s, was variously described as Gothic or Renaissance, with its gold grounds and hieratic poses as well as its perspectival constructions and naturalistic expressions. His exclusively pious subject matter made him seem conservative; but his...
Faced with a parade of flushed Madonnas and anguished Christs, it would be easy to think that Fra Angelico was somehow apart from the intellectual and interdisciplinary advances we associate with the Renaissance. Yet he was incorporating many of these innovations into his practice.
The Syrian government’s effort to take full control of the north-east clearly has the approval of the United States. After meeting with al-Sharaa . . .
The World Economic Forum in Davos is ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and . . .
The destruction of Palestinian lives is now a base line in a holding pattern. The ferocious white heat of the past two years of unrelenting attacks . . .
Chimpanzees, New Caledonian crows – and now cows. The list of animals that use tools grew a little longer this week, with a paper in Current . . .
‘Safety is a trigger word for me,’ Aliyah says on the first day of the women’s circle in the documentary Holloway . . .
Cognac sales have been in decline since 2022, particularly in its two biggest markets, the United States and China. The reasons include tariffs . . .
The US desire to annex Greenland is traceable to at least 1867 and the ambitions of the secretary of state William H. Seward, who negotiated . . .
Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its head of state have overshadowed his less brazen but possibly more effective regime-change . . .
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and...
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems...
The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement on the north bank of the Thames by 48 AD, five years after their invasion. That early military encampment expanded to become a busy, cosmopolitan supply base until it was burned down in the Boudican revolt of 60 AD.
In the first episode of her...
The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement on the north bank of the Thames by 48 AD, five...
For the final episode, host Daniel Soar is joined by Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson for a live discussion on the War on Terror and its aftershocks.
They consider the powers and techniques established after 9/11 and now being deployed by the US – in Venezuela, Minneapolis and beyond. What is the legacy of America’s ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East, and...
For the final episode, host Daniel Soar is joined by Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson for a live discussion on the War on Terror and its aftershocks.
They consider the powers and...
Adam Tooze's LRB Autumn Lecture at the New School, NYC on 27 October 2025
China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An alignment between the three major petrostates – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia – no longer looks implausible. The outlines of a new Cold War are becoming visible, one which...
Adam Tooze's LRB Autumn Lecture at the New School, NYC on 27 October 2025
China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel...
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right?’, Thomas Meaney asked in the LRB, reviewing Sam Tanenhaus’s recent biography of the founder of National...
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it...
Hero and Leander was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a...
Hero and Leander was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in...
In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in Latin America. Yet in this case, Trump’s justifications for the action made no mention of democracy, but cited, among other things, migration, narco-terrorism and oil. In this episode, James is joined by historian Greg Grandin to...
In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in Latin America. Yet in this case,...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.’
On this episode of the podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss some possible answers to those questions. They talk about the history of companies...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment, Camus became a journalist in Algiers and planned his writing career around three concepts based on the figures of Sisyphus, Prometheus and Nemesis, a scheme that he never finished.
Jonathan Rée...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment,...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...
On the Close Readings podcast, longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works.
Listen to our four new series running in 2026: Narrative Poems, Nature in Crisis, London Revisited and Who’s afraid of realism? plus a free bonus series, The Man Behind the Curtain.
This year’s Winter Lectures include Amia Srinivasan on politics and psychoanalysis (12 December), Adam Shatz on ideas of America (16 January) and Seamus Perry on pluralism and the modern poet (30 January).
View details of each lecture and buy tickets here.
In the next issue: Adam Shatz on visions of America; Rosemary Hill on Jessica Mitford; Jonathan Rée on Alexandre Kojève.
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