The obituary in Le Monde was unequivocal: the death of Alexandre Kojève on 4 June 1968 had deprived France of one of its greatest civil servants. Kojève had worked at the Ministry of Economy and Finance for more than twenty years, overseeing Marshall Aid, nurturing the European Economic Community and brokering the Kennedy round of tariff agreements, and he died in harness, at...
Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on the Phenomenology of the Spirit is not only misleading but slapdash, dogmatic, frivolous and flamboyant. The characters he filled it with, from the Master and Slave to the Sensualist and the Sage, sound rather like Mr Worldly Wiseman, Madam Bubble and Mr Sagacity in Pilgrim’s Progress.
‘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.
When Deborah Cavendish, duchess of Devonshire, died at the age of 94 in September 2014, the obituary headlines rang the changes on ‘the end of an era’ and ‘the last of the Mitford sisters’. If the first was true, the second was not. It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica, one of Deborah Devonshire’s older siblings,...
It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica Mitford called ‘the Mitford Industry’ has powered on in spite of the absence of its principals (and in some cases because of it), refuelled by access to new material and a reduced fear of libel.
In a crowded conference room in January 2025, Hossein Marashi, secretary-general of the Executives of Reconstruction Party and brother-in-law of Iran’s former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, compared the country’s situation after the collapse of the Syrian state to the crisis it faced at the al-Faw peninsula in 1988. During the First Battle of al-Faw in 1986, Iranian forces...
Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’ has long since ceased to mean anything to the population at large. Many Iranians blame their country’s isolation and economic immiseration on their leaders’ foreign policy decisions.
I live on the top floor of a block of flats in western Tehran. I turned off the lights and watched the city below. It was slowly changing shape. Shops were closing. People were running through the streets. My phone rang. It was a friend. ‘We’re going to Qeytarieh Square,’ he said. ‘Come with us.’
I live on the top floor of a block of flats in western Tehran. I turned off the lights and watched the city below. It was slowly changing shape. Shops were closing. People were running through the streets. My phone rang. It was a friend. ‘We’re going to Qeytarieh Square,’ he said. ‘Come with us.’
Julius Caesar ‘invaded Britain in the hope of finding pearls’. Caesar Augustus ‘wore platform shoes, to make him seem taller than he was’. Tiberius ‘was left-handed, with joints so strong that he could push a finger right through a firm, ripe apple’. Caligula ‘never learned to swim’. Claudius ‘would never let anything come between him...
As Mary Beard has put it, ‘How could you control and defend a vast empire, stretching from Spain to Syria, with a power structure and a system of military command developed to run nothing more than a small town?’ Caesar was only finishing what Sulla and others had started in the preceding decades. But the question still remains: why Caesar?
Human beings seem to have a unique relationship to time. We carry within ourselves a sense of our past and future lives extending over decades. (Other creatures appear to live mainly in the present, though we know too little about the inner lives of elephants, for example, to have a firm opinion about this.) We can all second William Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not...
Our lives don’t just play out over time: we lead them over the course of that time, shaping them as an extended whole, remembering and reacting to the past, anticipating, planning and creating the future. To lead a life is to be always aware that the moving present is embedded in an extended history, which helps determine the significance of what one does or feels now.
It was in a Quonset hut south of the Potomac that Peter Matthiessen met James Jesus Angleton, ‘a cadaverous, hawk-boned man with dark hair, large elfin ears and a lively intelligent face behind horn-rimmed glasses’, as Matthiessen later described him in an unpublished account of his recruitment to the CIA in the autumn of 1950. They had a ‘pleasant talk’. In True...
Over the years Matthiessen, Harold ‘Doc’ Humes and George Plimpton would vie for credit as to who ‘invented’ the Paris Review. ‘PARIS REVIEW C’EST MOI,’ Matthiessen told Gay Talese, in a 1963 Esquire article that cemented the legend. Humes credited the name to Matthiessen. ‘I am the Father of the Magazine,’ he once said. ‘George is the Mother.’
In the autumn of 1777, as the American War ground on, Charles James Fox paid his first visit to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth. The young duchess was captivated by her new house guest. His conversation, Georgiana told her mother, ‘is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff paff’. For his part, Fox was enamoured of his hostess...
Edmund Burke and Charles Fox’s relationship could not withstand the ideological chasm that emerged between them after the French Revolution. But they believed passionately in the importance of friendship. In a clubbable century, both men had ample opportunity to learn its value and to be hurt by moments that revealed its fragility.
In 711 ce, the last king of the Visigoths, Roderic or Rodrigo, was defeated by Umayyad conquerors, an event that marked the loss of Andalusia to Muslim rule. According to legend, Rodrigo had defiled the daughter of a certain Count Julian, who in revenge invited the Umayyads to invade Spain. Four hundred years later, the Andalusi Muslim historian Ibn Bassām recorded a prophecy that had...
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid, cultivated his own personal army, made up of both Christians and Muslims, rewarding their loyalty with the spoils of plunder. How did a warlord who pillaged with ‘impious devastation’, Nora Berend asks, become a Catholic saint?
Hyperion is the name that Meta has chosen for a huge AI data centre it is building in Louisiana. In July, a striking image circulated on social media of Hyperion’s footprint superimposed on an aerial view of Manhattan. It covered a huge expanse of the island, from the East River to the Hudson, from Soho to the uptown edge of Central Park. I assumed that the image had been made by...
AI’s scale doesn’t matter just to specialists. The rest of us are being taken on a ride along the logarithmic curve too. The graphics chips and data centres on which ‘arbitrary amounts’ are being spent require huge quantities of electricity to power them. Some of this is coming from renewable sources, but much of it involves burning natural gas or sometimes even coal.
Barnett Newman was an ‘eminence’ in the postwar art world, Amy Newman (no relation) writes in her exhaustive biography; at the time of his death in 1970 no one in his cohort was more revered. Yet today he is largely forgotten, which is one indication of how much the terms of art have changed. Was he eclipsed by the many artists he influenced, and are they now eclipsed in...
Newman railed against the machinations of art critics despite being expert at them. There is ‘no such thing as art “history”’, he claimed, even as he wanted nothing more than to be inscribed in it. Although his most famous bon mot is ‘aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds,’ this amateur ornithologist was an aesthetician first to last.
The story of archaeology in Egypt usually begins with the Napoleonic expedition of 1798-1801 and Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822. That’s the European side of the story: Arab scholars had already been recording and debating pharaonic monuments and scripts for centuries. In the 19th century, the Ottoman khedive (or viceroy) Muhammad Ali and...
The absence of critical or fresh perspectives on Egyptology and its history, or any of the decolonial approaches that are debated by archaeologists and Egyptologists today, subverts claims for restitution. The Grand Egyptian Museum already has its perfect account: what would other objects add to the narrative?
Two thousand miles north-west of Rio de Janeiro, the Javari Valley is a swathe of the Brazilian Amazon larger than Scotland and accessible only by boat or helicopter. Its ecological riches and isolated tribes – sixteen known groups, the largest concentration of uncontacted peoples on earth, with drones intermittently detecting the vestiges of other tribes – have tempted...
As the journalist Dom Phillips came to see it, the deforestation of the Amazon was the work of a stupendously profitable interlocking network of corporate and political actors. ‘You don’t have to look far in the Brazilian Amazon to find people breaking the law,’ he writes in How to Save the Amazon. In the Brazilian interior, legality ‘exists in a separate dimension, where people only need to pay it passing attention from time to time’.
It’s almost impossible to read any work on meritocracy without being reminded that the word was first used in mid-20th-century Britain to portray a dystopian society, a rigid caste system in which a smug elite claimed power on the basis of superior effort and ability. But it was imperial China where meritocratic ideals were first brought to life. The keju, or imperial civil service...
In a country plagued by corruption, China’s national college entrance exam, the gaokao, is remarkably clean. ‘Open and competitive’ are the watchwords of democratic elections, but they are also the defining features of China’s exam empire. Exams are its functional substitute for the ballot box.
I live on the top floor of a block of flats in western Tehran. I turned off the lights and watched the city below. It was slowly changing shape . . .
In the wreckage of the neoliberal order they once championed, there are a number of paths available to Europe’s social democrats. Keir Starmer’s . . .
On 10 September 2025, the environmental activist and community leader Sonam Wangchuk began a 35-day hunger strike, along with fourteen other . . .
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 . . .
‘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: Seamus Perry on pluralism and the modern poet; Claire Hall on Archimedes; James Meek reports from Romania.
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