Halfway through Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), the heroine, a young singer called Thea Kronborg, travels to the Southwest and takes for herself a little rock room among the cliff dwellings. She is accompanied by her soon-to-be-lover Fred Ottenburg – wealthy and secretly married – but the purpose of the pilgrimage is to be alone, to think and to strengthen her...
Willa Cather’s reader, like her characters, must keep an ear out for the whisper, an eye out for the sign and a hand out for the scrap of paper. Cather has the ability to build the holy object backwards from information.
‘The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge Union last October. ‘And as you can see, sir,’ he told the union president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual...
Why was Steele’s dossier, alleging collusion between Trump and Putin, so shoddy, and why, despite this, did it command such influence? For all his purported expertise, he possesses no academic background in Russian studies, lived there continuously for just three years of a 22-year career and, by his own admission, hasn’t visited the country since 2009.
Some friends of mine support the war and some are vehemently against it. Some of those who wanted the Americans and the Israelis to bomb Iran have changed their minds since the war started. Iranians in the diaspora want war but those of us living it first-hand are frightened.
Some friends of mine support the war and some are vehemently against it. Some of those who wanted the Americans and the Israelis to bomb Iran have changed their minds since the war started. Iranians in the diaspora want war but those of us living it first-hand are frightened.
‘You’re not men. You’re boys. If there was no social media, you would be my concubines.’ One of the weirdest lines of the 2024 US election came from Robert J. O’Neill, a pro-Trump former Navy SEAL who claims to have been one of those who shot Osama bin Laden. Respondents to O’Neill’s post on X, which was directed at a gaggle of young, male...
History breeds discomfort. Foucault’s basic question is still of great interest: what is it about sex that makes people believe it expresses fundamental truths about the self, and when did that belief arise? Being neither entirely alien nor entirely familiar, early modernity can engender particular anxiety when thinking about this question.
On 3 November 1876, two days after the unexpected death of his younger brother René, Gustave Caillebotte made his will. He was 28.
It is my wish that sufficient funds be allocated from my estate to finance in 1878, under the best possible conditions, the exhibition of the painters known as Intransigents or Impressionists. It is rather difficult for me to estimate today what the...
Why did Caillebotte paint so many men? Why did he repeatedly paint the bodies and faces of men, in a variety of settings and with a variety of purposes that cannot add up to a statement or query about male identity (because why would they), but surely tell us something about the identity of Gustave Caillebotte, male painter?
In June 1934, Richmal Crompton published ‘William and the Nasties’ in the Happy Magazine, an interwar journal that provided readers with a cheerful stream of popular fiction. In this story, William Brown, 11-year-old leader of the Outlaws, decides to become a Nazi. Despite his interest in ‘rightin’ people’s wrongs’, he has been impressed by his friend...
Sally Carson’s dissection of the question that has disturbed the European mind for decades – how did it happen? – has touched a contemporary nerve, and the new edition of Crooked Cross has met with unexpected success. The novel is driven by a steady building of cold dread, as the reader is led to appreciate the extent to which life in Germany has been corroded by hatred and fear.
The images from Iran since 28 February have been dismayingly familiar. The Islamic Republic’s leaders are being killed off. US military officers are using AI to pick their targets. Government buildings, police stations and other public institutions have been destroyed; an air strike hit a primary school during morning classes, killing 168, almost all of them schoolgirls. Israeli leaders...
It’s no surprise that Operation Roaring Lion (Israel’s name for its campaign) and Operation Epic Fury (as the US calls its own) bear the hallmarks of Israel’s offensives on the Gaza Strip. War with Iran is a long-held ambition of Netanyahu’s, but Gaza is where he and his generals designed the playbook that is now being followed in that war.
The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with a number of other leading officials, in the first few hours of the Iran War has confirmed that assassination is a routine tool of Israeli policy. Over the past two years, Israel has successfully targeted the military and political leadership of Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis, serially eliminating officials almost as soon as they step into...
Mossad relied heavily on assorted European security agencies for intelligence on Palestinian activities. Not only did they often provide the intelligence Mossad needed to select its targets, they also helped confirm when those targets were in a location they could be got at. The Europeans could have had little doubt that they were participating in an assassination campaign conducted on their own territory.
Adam Smith began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as...
Labour was once an organic part of the peasant household, done in the interest of subsistence. Certainly many people in early modern England worked for wages and everyone bought things at market. But most grew at least some of their own food, gathered their own wool and made their own clothes. They had a much more direct stake in the means of production.
Revisiting old haunts is a hazardous pastime. The beloved buildings may look smaller or shabbier, the unforgettable view is ruined by the new solar farm, the once fascinating characters in the novel have lost their power to enchant, everything seems blurred or – the verdict from which there is no appeal – dated. Surely Raffles would be the least likely fictional hero to survive...
His exploits seem to belong, irredeemably, to the world of gaslight and hansom cabs. But no, Raffles survives, and it’s not just the verve and breakneck pace of the stories. What captivated me once again, what I had more or less forgotten, was the angst.
On 18 January, ten vans of immigration agents carrying rifles and riot shields descended on Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis. At the home of ChingLy ‘Scott’ Thao, a US citizen, they knocked quickly before shattering the front door with a battering ram. They yanked Thao, who was wearing only bright blue boxers and Crocs, out into the sub-zero cold and bundled him into a...
The Trump administration has introduced two new policies that aim to turn citizens into migrants who can be expelled. The first, a narrowing of birthright citizenship, has attracted considerable public attention and legal challenges; it seems likely to falter in the courts. The second is likely to escape judicial checking, which means it will probably be more consequential. It involves stripping naturalised citizens of their US status.
In 1889 Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a 72-year-old professor at the Collège de France, wrote a letter to the Lancet in which he reported the effects of injecting himself with guinea pig semen. The results were remarkable. He could once more lift heavy weights, no longer had to hold the banister when going down the stairs and his youthful vigour had returned in other...
As biochemical methods became more precise, the eventual identification of the magical substance, insulin, was inevitable. What was far from inevitable was that it would be discovered in the early 1920s at the University of Toronto by a group of four scientists, only two of whom would be awarded the Nobel Prize, resulting in a bitter dispute that overshadowed their subsequent careers.
The Cuban artist Wifredo Lam’s best-known work, La jungla (1942-43), is a riotous and unsettling painting. Measuring nearly eight feet by seven-and-a-half, it features a series of anthropomorphic figures standing amid dense green vegetation. They are long-limbed, with outsize feet and curving buttocks; parts of faces, somewhere between stylised human and totemic animal, float above...
Lam referred to a ‘desire to include in my painting all the transculturation that had occurred in Cuba’ – using a term coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz to describe the island’s fusion of cultures. The ingredients Lam identified included ‘the native population, the Spanish, the Africans, the Chinese, French immigrants, pirates’, adding: ‘I claim all this past for myself.’
On 1 November 2024, the canopy of a recently renovated train station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing sixteen people. In the weeks that followed, a new protest movement coalesced; it continues to demonstrate sixteen months later. For its leaders, the collapse is symptomatic of the corruption at the heart of Aleksandar Vučić’s increasingly authoritarian government. Questions around...
On 1 November 2024, the canopy of a recently renovated train station in Novi Sad collapsed, killing sixteen people. In the weeks that followed, a new protest movement coalesced; it continues to demonstrate sixteen months later. For its leaders, the collapse is symptomatic of the corruption at the heart of Aleksandar Vučić’s increasingly authoritarian government.
Dare you but write, you are Minerva’s bird,The owl at which these bats and crows must wonder,They’ll criticise upon the smallest word:This wanteth number, case, that tense and gender.
If you think you know what the 17th-century poet Anne Southwell means by referring to Minerva’s owl, you are probably wrong. Southwell is alluding to Ovid’s story of a jealous crow, who...
Was there such a thing as a female style in early modern England? For several authors, valorising originality meant claiming legitimacy in a society that gave them little chance to learn and would likely dismiss them as pretenders.
Jürgen Habermas may be variously described as the moral conscience of postwar Germany, the last great systematic philosopher, the dominant figure . . .
Some friends of mine support the war and some are vehemently against it. Some of those who wanted the Americans and the Israelis to bomb Iran . . .
The first vaccines a two-month-old child gets in England offer protection against three species of virus and five bacteria. Since 2015, they . . .
As fast as the flames flew up, the news of the fire spread not just through the city but among Glaswegians in other parts of the world – another . . .
On 5 June 1975, four carabinieri officers, in one car, drove up a winding road to an isolated farmhouse above Acqui Terme in northern Italy . . .
Thucydides is having another moment. Donald Trump’s foreign policy has provoked a rash of allusions to a line from the Melian Dialogue: ‘The . . .
Ten years ago Berta Cáceres, a campaigner against dams and mining projects that were displacing rural communities in Honduras, said that death . . .
Professional leagues are sprawling multinational corporations grossing tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue, employing tens of thousands . . .
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, which will be dated 23 April, Ian Penman on the Beach Boys.
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