Britain’s ‘world-leading’ university system is in deep trouble. There are, inevitably, conflicting diagnoses of the malady, but the indicators of deteriorating health are too ubiquitous to be ignored. When a substantial number of universities are in serious financial jeopardy, with some hinting at possible bankruptcy in the short term (according to the Office for Students,...
The problems with Britain’s universities are systemic and deep-rooted, not just local or contingent. Yet political and media discussions remain at an almost wilfully superficial level, largely focused on whether the current loan system is ‘unfair’ to students. To go deeper, we need to examine the premises underlying that system and to look at the transformative effects they have had on universities in the past fourteen years.
The appearance of a new ethical theory is a rare event, but it happened in 1982 with the publication of T.M. Scanlon’s essay ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’. Although he called his theory contractualism, Scanlon does not postulate an actual social contract between the members of a society, like Hobbes, or a hypothetical contract under imaginary conditions, like Rawls....
Whether the causal order of nature is deterministic or partly random, people do not create themselves. So how can it make sense to blame them for what they do? Punishment makes sense only as a deterrent, not as retribution, and feelings of condemnation and resentment towards a criminal are as out of place as they would be towards a tiger.
Around the chilly shores of the Baltic, for nine hundred years from the ninth century, a succession of Dark Age monks, Franciscan friars, Reformed or Lutheran Protestant pastors and Jesuits ruefully recalled that in the Garden of Eden ‘the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’ (Genesis 3:1). During this first biblical stage of its...
Until at least the 17th century, the good folk of the Baltic region were notorious for cherishing specimens of the local snake population in their homes, keeping them well fed and watered. Were these reptiles merely a peculiar local form of pet or were they sinister herpetological divinities?
It’s a sorry situation when the most repeated fact about someone’s life is that a famous person was best man at their wedding. Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts recalled....
Lynette Roberts loved obscure words and was not shy about using them. Over the course of two pages, I had to look up ‘corymb’, ‘cymes’, ‘chyles’, ‘cuprite’, ‘gault’, ‘zebeline’, ‘tamarisk’, ‘neumes’ and ‘whimbrel’. Where else, you might ask, can a person make such liberal use of exotic words, if not in a modernist poem from the 1940s?
Three friends represent the three poles of Benjamin’s intellectual trajectory: Gershom Scholem embodied the messianic legacy of Judaism, Bertolt Brecht the radical potential of the avant-gardes, and Theodor Adorno the attempt to turn Marxism into a theory of culture and what Benjamin called the ‘structure of experience’. All three sought to keep the critical-revolutionary tradition alive in the face of fascism.
Three friends represent the three poles of Benjamin’s intellectual trajectory: Gershom Scholem embodied the messianic legacy of Judaism, Bertolt Brecht the radical potential of the avant-gardes, and Theodor Adorno the attempt to turn Marxism into a theory of culture and what Benjamin called the ‘structure of experience’. All three sought to keep the critical-revolutionary tradition alive in the face of fascism.
Ican’t remember the last time I used cash. My bank statements show that I haven’t made a withdrawal from a cashpoint in the last twelve months. That’s just as well, since it’s significantly more of an effort to get hold of cash than it used to be. Before the pandemic, there were seven cashpoints within a five-minute walk from my house. All of them have now gone: the...
If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big?
Marlen Haushofer’s masterpiece, The Wall (1963), opens with the cessation of time, at least as humans mark and measure it. ‘Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report,’ the narrator writes, before correcting herself: ‘I don’t even know if today is really the fifth of November. Over the course of the past winter I’ve lost track of a few...
Walls of various kinds are present in almost all of Marlen Haushofer’s writing. They are a means of both entrapment and escape. Why else would the narrator of The Wall, who confronts the tallest and most impenetrable of all Haushofer’s barriers, also be the most joyful of her characters?
In the late summer of 30 bce, months after defeating Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, Octavian entered Alexandria, meeting little resistance. Like Caesar before him, he visited the tomb of Alexander the Great. The golden sarcophagus was opened and Octavian adorned the mummified corpse with flowers and a gold crown (according to one source, he accidentally broke off a piece of...
The Ptolemies came too late for many histories of Greece and Egypt and too early for Rome. Alexandria, their capital, has disappeared beneath the sea and the modern city. Their grandest monument, the Library of Alexandria, was destroyed at least twice in antiquity. Even among academics, this period of history has often been seen as secondary. Yet it was the Ptolemies who wrote Egyptian history as we know it.
In 2012 the 96-year-old Bernard Lewis went on American radio to promote his book Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian. Neal Conan, the host of NPR’s Talk of the Nation, introduced him as a man unafraid of sensitive subjects and invited listeners to call in with questions about ‘taboos’ in Middle Eastern history. Conan asked whether race and slavery...
That slavery persisted in Muslim societies well into the 20th century is undeniable. More questions need to be asked about its distinctive features, the extent of its connection with the Atlantic trade and the forms of racialisation that underpinned it.
People vote irrationally in local elections, at least according to the standards of political scientists. That is, their vote is often motivated by factors outside the purview of local government. The dismal result for Labour in England’s local elections on 7 May was not predominantly a revolt over bin collections. It was strongly related to national revulsion for Labour, and to the...
Despite a few halting steps towards devolving power in Britain, England itself remains a profoundly centralised country, in which national politics always dominates. So why not send a national message? Keir Starmer implored voters to ‘choose progress over the politics of anger’. It is a classic Starmer line, all injunction and no argument. Why shouldn’t voters be angry?
The movie producer, cinematographer and screenwriter Harrison Starr died in 2024 at the age of 95. Almost no one noticed. If his name was ever mentioned it was usually in connection with those of more famous collaborators. He was the producer of Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary flop Zabriskie Point, which came out in 1970, and the year before he made a cameo appearance in Kurt...
Harrison’s life and career were part of the postwar flowering of the avant-garde, which reached its apotheosis in the 1970s. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow won the National Book Award; Jean-Luc Godard, Miles Davis, Ingmar Bergman, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin et al. were interviewed on national television. For a few years, it seemed as if Harrison would be one of the great beneficiaries of this moment.
George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, featured a cast who were mostly dead, though still conversational, and his new novel, Vigil, revisits the device – one that goes back in American literature at least as far as 1915 and Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology. In that book a town’s dead inhabitants...
Circumstantial evidence (defective internal logic, uncontrolled tone, bizarreness for its own sake) suggests that Vigil is an attempt at a comic novel by someone without much of a sense of humour. If Saunders’s novel ever forms part of the vast swathe of writing used to train artificial intelligence then the robot scanners won’t learn much about organising a narrative, but I dare say that’s the least of our worries.
The British royal family traces its descent from the Norman Conquest; the numbering of monarchs dates from 1066. That Charles III’s great-uncle was the eighth King Edward, for instance, ignores Edward the Confessor, despite William the Conqueror claiming the throne as his kinsman as well as by his royal gift. From this perspective, the kingdom of England began in 1066. In other...
While Æthelstan’s grandfather, Alfred, had revived the practice of issuing law codes, Æthelstan was by far the most industrious legislator his dynasty had produced, responsible for six in all. Was Æthelstan the first true king of England?
In John Cheever’s Bullet Park (1969), Eliot Nailles, a mild-mannered advertising executive, is asked by an Italian doctor: ‘Why do Americans want to be immortal?’ Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, offers a playful reformulation of this question. In some ways, it’s a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are...
In some ways, Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, is a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are treated as intolerable embarrassments. Barrodale rejects self-improvement, opting instead for an undisciplined, unlikeable narrator who also happens to be dead.
The United States brought the war on terror to practically every part of the world – landing military advisers on the Sulu archipelago in the Philippines, operating black sites in Poland and Romania, filling the cages of Guantánamo Bay. But the challenge to American power presented by the 11 September attacks came from a particular region: what Adam Garfinkle, a future...
Many of those who had been involved in the war’s inception saw the chaotic Nato withdrawal in August 2021 as a betrayal both of Afghanistan and of the project of American power in the world. As with Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is not yet widely acknowledged to have been a crime rather than just a mistake, but even the political establishment in the West sees it as a cautionary tale.
Last summer, the singer Akon announced that Akon City – the ‘real-life Wakanda’ that he planned to build on the Senegalese coast – was . . .
Unfortunately for Mexicans, Mexico has moved to the top of the US foreign policy agenda. After Trump kidnapped the Venezuelan president Nicolás . . .
Before the war, Muhammad had been the most energetic of us. He wasn’t tall, but he never saw that as an obstacle. He was always the first to . . .
Max Richter’s Sleep, made up of 204 continuous movements, plays for nearly eight and a half hours. This is not as long as Erik Satie’s Vexations . . .
Two marches will assemble in central London tomorrow. One is championing the rights of Palestinians and commemorating 78 years of displacement . . .
A hantavirus outbreak is extremely unexpected. Part of the confusion in press coverage has arisen from the messiness of viral classification . . .
My life’s journey, through many countries as a foreigner, should end where it started, at Ma’in Abu Sitta. David Ben-Gurion, who led the . . .
Three friends represent the three poles of Benjamin’s intellectual trajectory: Gershom Scholem embodied the messianic legacy of Judaism, Bertolt . . .
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every individual; in the US it’s more than $7000, and the majority of this exists in the highest-denomination banknotes, such as the $100 and €500 bills. So where is it all? Remarkably, nobody really...
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every...
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the time when computer games didn't even have screens, and in this episode he talks to Tom about the enormous changes generative AI has brought to programming and the world of work in the past couple of...
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the...
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and...
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in...
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second in Scotland (tied with Reform UK) and lost nearly 1500 councillors in England. But while Plaid Cymru and the SNP were victorious in Wales and Scotland, in many ways the results in England were a...
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession,...
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB. Last October, he set out on a road trip across America, with the aim of attending as many different kinds of criminal and civil trials as possible in one month. His journey took him from immigration...
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB....
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: Stefan Collini on the crisis in universities.
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