In November 1907 William James, professor of philosophy at Harvard, received an invitation from Oxford. It came from Manchester College – now Harris Manchester and a college of the university, but then an autonomous dissenting institution with a strong Unitarian character, recently relocated from London: its business was to cater to Nonconformist students who were still barred from...
‘Art arises,’ Auden writes, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a moment a poem lets us, in a way that discursive prose, for instance, cannot.
Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance. The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralise the headline. The long-term consequences – the erosion of empathy, the normalisation of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.
Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance. The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the clip, neutralise the headline. The long-term consequences – the erosion of empathy, the normalisation of cruelty, a growing sense that nobody in charge believes what they say – are outsourced to society to endure.
‘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...
Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations dissolves? Or perhaps all of the above?
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...
Suetonius, writing in the early second century, is notorious for the salacious details he shared of the depraved sex lives and sadistic murder sprees of the early Roman emperors, but there’s more to The Lives of the Caesars than the X-rated material.
When I was at nursery school in Beijing in the 1970s, there was a teacher who seemed to find tireless pleasure in tormenting the children. Living in today’s America reminds me of that nursery school. The reigning tyranny; the people who, like my mother, say this can’t be true, life can’t be that terrible; if bad things happen, you are the problem; do not provoke; keep up the hope; things will be better – by the midterms, in four years, some day.
When I was at nursery school in Beijing in the 1970s, there was a teacher who seemed to find tireless pleasure in tormenting the children. Living in today’s America reminds me of that nursery school. The reigning tyranny; the people who, like my mother, say this can’t be true, life can’t be that terrible; if bad things happen, you are the problem; do not provoke; keep up the hope; things will be better – by the midterms, in four years, some day.
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 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.
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...
‘When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with yr beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain,’ Peter Matthiessen wrote to his friend Ben Bradlee. ‘Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that?’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
For Barnett Newman, what was required was a new kind of painting produced ‘as if painting never existed before’, a painting that would convey the exaltation of its making in the moment of its viewing, a painting that would proclaim (as he later put it to the critic Thomas Hess) that ‘Man is Present’: ‘Here I am, here.’
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’.
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?
When I was at nursery school in Beijing in the 1970s, there was a teacher who seemed to find tireless pleasure in tormenting the children. Living . . .
Much of our politics now consists of performance rather than governance. The calculations are short-term by design: win the week, dominate the . . .
My friend Mahmoud called to check on me at the beginning of January. We hadn’t been in touch for a while. I told him, as always, that I missed . . .
In 2023, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to clarify, first, the obligations . . .
‘The effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomisation, the disappearance of ... organised opposition,’ . . .
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 . . .
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...
‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of Madame Bovary. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been...
‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of Madame Bovary. Taken on its own, it’s a simple...
The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic executed thousands of leftists and other dissidents. In this episode, Adam Shatz talks to Chowra Makaremi and Amir Ahmadi Arian about the evolution of public dissent in Iran since 1979 and why the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement of 2022...
The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic executed thousands of leftists and other...
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...
‘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...
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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