One morning in the summer of 2016, a few weeks into the disorientating aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, my wife and I sat in a community centre in Poplar, East London with our baby son. Our three-year-old daughter must have been at nursery. The occasion was a ‘consultation’ hosted by Tower Hamlets Council on the ‘future of Children’s...
This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave.
The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm. The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately...
Most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. A lived-in landscape has been turned into what a former Israeli general, Giora Eiland, described as a place ‘where no human being can exist’.
One Sunday morning recently I listened, one after the other, to Monteverdi’s Selva morale e spirituale (1641) and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), and it wasn’t in any way jarring. I have to say, though, that it was by Pet Sounds that I felt truly transported. Between July 1965 and April 1966, the 23-year-old Brian Wilson wrote, arranged, produced and sang on songs...
In 1983, Brian Wilson told a reporter: ‘I think ultimately I’m just a sound. I don’t know if I’m a human being.’ This boy-child’s story has recognisable stages: he begins in a kind of innocence, ascends to glory, tarries with self-mortification, then returns from the dead.
As a twelve-year-old Boy Scout and altar boy, I always brought my gun to church. After murmuring my responses in the Latin mass, gleeful when I heard the ‘Ite, missa est,’ I hurried to the nearby woods to blast away at beer cans or paper targets. Father Burns sighed whenever he saw me stowing my bolt-action Mossberg .22 calibre rifle in my locker and slipping on my cassock and...
Hunting seems to me cruel, but in Hawaii I have an AK-47 for shooting wild pigs that arrive in sounders of eight or more to menace me and my geese. My neighbours help with skinning and gutting them, and I give them half the meat. Seeing my serious Chinese-made firearm, Haruki Murakami once said to me: ‘You’re the only writer I know who has a gun.’
J.H. Prynne has always seemed to me to represent the real potential of poetry, as an art that can encompass everything, every kind of feeling and every element of knowledge, and shape it into a form that affects its readers in a way that nothing else can.
J.H. Prynne has always seemed to me to represent the real potential of poetry, as an art that can encompass everything, every kind of feeling and every element of knowledge, and shape it into a form that affects its readers in a way that nothing else can.
When Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman died in 1997, having suffered a brain haemorrhage in the pool of the Paris Ritz, the tributes divided into accounts of a harsh life powered by sex, and prim obituaries that extolled a leading diplomat and ‘doyenne of the Democratic Party’. Madeleine Albright called her ‘a central figure in the history of this century’ and...
When Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman died in 1997, having suffered a brain haemorrhage in the pool of the Paris Ritz, the tributes divided into accounts of a harsh life powered by sex, and prim obituaries that extolled a leading diplomat and ‘doyenne of the Democratic Party’.
The idea of a road trip organised around trials and hearings at courthouses across the US had been in my head for years. Last autumn I found myself in a position to make it a reality. I had a month. My aim was to attend as many different kinds of criminal and civil hearing in as many parts of the country as I could. Some courts post their weekly dockets online but most don’t, so there...
The idea of a road trip organised around trials and hearings at court houses across the US had been in my head for years. Last autumn I found myself in a position to make it a reality. I had a month. My aim was to attend as many different kinds of criminal and civil hearings in as many parts of the country as I could get to.
In November 1956, a few weeks after Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, a 21-year-old Ágota Kristóf and her husband, Janos Béri, decided to leave their home in Kőszeg, in north-west Hungary. Kristóf wasn’t really involved in politics, but Béri, who had taken part in the uprising against Mátyás Rákosi’s Stalinist government, had...
The Kristóf who emerges from the sources was, like the twins in the Notebook trilogy, a person divided in two. In Hungary she had lived; in Switzerland she wrote. For Kristóf, the two were nearly incompatible. ‘Writing prevents me from living,’ she said in 1996. ‘It’s almost suicidal.’
James Schuyler gave his first public reading on 15 November 1988. People queued around the block to get a seat, and at the end he received the longest, most unconsciously glad applause Eileen Myles had ever heard in New York. ‘As for my moment in the spotlight,’ Schuyler reported to a friend a couple of days later, ‘well, truth to tell, I was a fucking sensation.’...
Schuyler once told an interviewer that he didn’t write the kind of poetry that attracted critics. ‘It’s too easy,’ he added, with a laugh. It wasn’t easy, though, to arrive at his kind of ease.
‘The Ambassadors’ (1533)
On any day of the week, you will find a sizeable crowd at the National Gallery standing in front of the painting now known as The Ambassadors: Hans Holbein’s life-sized double portrait of 1533 depicting Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador in England, and his friend and fellow humanist Georges de Selve, bishop of Lavaur, who passed through...
More has probably been written about The Ambassadors than about any other work by Holbein. Is the painting a commentary on the religious divisions threatening to rip apart Christendom in the early 1530s? A reminder of the frailty of life and the inevitability of death? An essay on the conflict between secular and sacred authorities? A celebration of friendship in the classical sense of the friend as a second self?
The word is not the thing. In spoken language a word is a distinctive sound or series of sounds. It does not have a ‘natural’ relationship to the thing it stands for. Ferdinand de Saussure theorised that a sign is made up of two parts: the signifier (the physical form taken by the sign, for instance a spoken word or its written representation) and the signified (the concept the...
So far as we know, true symbolic language is unique to the human species. The question of how we alone came to be blessed – or cursed – with words is not to be lightly dismissed. But it does come with a serious difficulty: language is an evolved feature of the human organism, but words don’t fossilise like bones. How then to find the missing links?
‘Marie-Antoinette en gaulle’ (1783) by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.
In February 1803 the Monthly Magazine offered a backhanded endorsement of women artists in its regular ‘Retrospect of Fine Arts’: ‘In an age so generally marked by the frivolity and dissipation of our women of rank, the few who by the cultivation of the fine arts emancipate...
The careers of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Maria Cosway required constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal reputation, artistic success and the need to earn a living, for neither was independently wealthy or ‘a woman of rank’. They both had supportive fathers and disastrous husbands who spent their money, failed to nurture their careers and in the end became burdensome.
Bait, Mark Jenkin’s first feature film, earned him the Bafta for best newcomer in 2020. Jenkin had been making short films for seventeen years by then. Most of them had been filmed with old cameras of one kind or another – super 8, 16 mm – and some had frames with rounded corners, which placed them somewhere between generations-old home movie and rediscovered newsreel...
Time is embedded in the way Mark Jenkin works – not just the occasional resurrection but the hand-cranked cameras and hand-processed film. His method involves hearing the fractions of a second ticking by as he shoots. He measures time and light as he exposes the film, time and temperature when he develops it himself, time and shape as he edits it.
Asense of ‘boundlessness’ afflicts Adam Gordon, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Adam is a poet on a fellowship in Madrid, using phone cards to call home to Kansas because he’s not settled enough to own a mobile phone. Being young abroad, open to new friendships and love affairs, writing without serious deadlines or money...
The interchangeable quality of the fictional elements in Ben Lerner’s novels signals an anxiety about his own artistic method, as it’s both the way his art is made and the thing that most troubles his characters, the sense that they are disposable and could easily be replaced.
Being underestimated was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. Her earliest talent was for invisibility. To the men who surrounded her father, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she was a gloomy, awkward girl. To the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, who tried and failed to dislodge her Congress Party from power in the 1960s, she was a gungi gudiya, a dumb doll....
Being underestimated was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. The Congress elders who helped her become India’s third prime minister in 1966 imagined that they were installing a pliable cipher. Within a few years she had defenestrated the lot of them. A decade on, she mounted a coup.
Last Wednesday, the reporter Amal Khalil and photojournalist Zeinab Faraj were on assignment in south Lebanon when Israeli drones struck the . . .
J.H. Prynne has always seemed to me to represent the real potential of poetry, as an art that can encompass everything, every kind of feeling . . .
J.H. Prynne died on Wednesday at the age of 89, after a prolific life as a teacher and essayist, a loyal friend to his students and, above all . . .
The UK’s nuclear weapons capability is dependent on the US. Not only does Britain rent its Trident missiles from America, but the British-built . . .
In Nayatt School, Spalding Gray played a ‘pedantic schoolteacher’ and the psychiatrist from The Cocktail Party, using a recording of its . . .
My father called from the market to say he needed my help. It was the end of February. Tensions between Israel and Iran were escalating and prices . . .
The music that showed me who I wanted to be, what I wanted from life, was the music that came out on Sarah Records . . .
The 2300 workers at the Volkswagen factory in Osnabrück, northwest Germany, have been confronted with an unexpected plan for industrial transformation . . .
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the...
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom...
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s Leo XIV has, but he may as well have done in his angry response to the American pope’s criticism of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran. With the US president’s supporters invoking the...
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s...
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River a ‘Hizbullah kill zone’.
In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in...
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’.
In...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest...
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that its cause began to be understood, as scientists conducted experiments on dogs. It was a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto in the early 1920s who – through a gruelling series...
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century...
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us angrier and filling billionaire-owned social media sites with monetisable content? Sarah Stein Lubrano has argued that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is a myth and the best ideas often...
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us...
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in the LRB, Andrew O’Hagan writes: ‘All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and “loyalty” in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Ghislaine Maxwell took this young girl to...
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in...
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election last month, the prime minister has managed to cling on, for now. His critics point to a lack of vision in government, the alienation of Labour members and a failure to accept the need for...
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton...
In a press conference on 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Earlier that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the ongoing strikes were ‘just the beginning’. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Robert Malley and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj to discuss the chaos of Trump’s Iran strategy, whether...
In a press conference on 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Earlier that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the...
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible.In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has...
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an...
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’.On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio represented his models' bodies on canvas – their muscles, skin, hair, clothing and dirty...
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this...
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under fifteen kilometres per hour. Yet postal systems, as pioneered by the enterprising Tassis family, were becoming ever more reliable and efficient, at first in northern Italy and then across much of...
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under...
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the Iraq war, the London Review of Books held a debate: ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ The panel comprised Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Jacqueline Rose, Anatol Lieven and Onora O’Neill.President Bush’s ultimatum set the tone: either you’re with us or you’re with the...
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the Iraq war, the London Review of Books held a debate: ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ The panel...
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This is among the many extraordinary details of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein revealed by the release of more than three million pages of documents by the US Justice Department last month....
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This...
In ‘The Light Eaters’ (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our ideas of plants as passive life forms. Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith explore Schlanger’s account of new research into plant behaviour. They examine the case for plant agency – and...
In ‘The Light Eaters’ (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our...
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? Seamus Perry considers the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and...
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and...
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long after that moved to the US where she became a naturalised citizen and joined the Communist Party.
The Mitford sisters wrote many books and even more have been written about them, but Carla Kaplan's...
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
Why is the London Review of Books putting out records?
We liked the idea of marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, and drawing on our rich archive of poems made sense. A 7-inch record has space for about eleven minutes of spoken word. Happily, this equates to a long-ish poem – the kind that takes up a whole page or even a double-page spread in the LRB – being read in full.
In the next issue: William Davies on hyperpolitics.
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