In 1936, two very different novels about plantation culture and the Southern experience of the Civil War received verdicts from the New York Times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind – with its cast of gallant gentlemen and cheerful slaves – was ‘in sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction’. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!...
In all of Flannery O’Connor’s work, there isn’t a single character you could describe as admirable, or even vaguely sympathetic. O’Connor said that her interest in such unedifying types was an antidote to ‘the hazy compassion demanded of the writer now’. If anything, she was inclined to exaggerate the unsavoury.
I’m not on social media, in part because the level of my rage and anxiety about American politics doesn’t need to get any higher. But I do feel obliged to keep an eye on the polity: I read the papers, go occasionally to demonstrations and, each morning, as I walk the twenty blocks from my apartment to Columbia to teach my classes, listen to news podcasts. Which means I spent the...
A girl doesn’t have to fall into Epstein’s clutches to see sexual abuse up close, and if she gets through childhood without experiencing it, she will probably find out that some close friend or relation didn’t. Men could find this out too, if they listened to voices besides their own. If they did, they might hear a story like the following one.
In the days of disco and Aramis 900, when the relationship between entitlement and sleaze could still seem novel, Prince Andrew came across like the more relatable sort of wanker, high on royal privilege but in touch with the inner life of the standard British male. ‘If he wasn’t a member of the royal family,’ the astrologer Russell Grant said, ‘his ideal role would...
With some people, money and sex are the only truths. It’s the ultimate delinquency to believe that gratification itself is power. When a lazy aristocrat from a dying dynasty uses a helicopter to travel seventeen miles, the edifice shakes. But when that same man rapes a 17-year-old and calls her a liar, it is the end of days.
Humankind, he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that disagreeable element was to go into hiding. For much of the second half of his life, T.S. Eliot was a man on the run, retreating to actual or symbolic boltholes, wearing a succession of masks, relying on routine to help him escape detection – even, it sometimes seemed,...
Humankind, he told us himself, ‘cannot bear very much reality’. One way to escape having to confront that disagreeable element was to go into hiding. For much of the second half of his life, T.S. Eliot was a man on the run, retreating to actual or symbolic boltholes, wearing a succession of masks, relying on routine to help him escape detection – even, it sometimes seemed, detection by himself.
At the age of fifteen, Chantal Akerman sneaked into a screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou. She was in the habit of skipping school with her friends and the cinema was one of their preferred hangout spots. But until that moment, Akerman had thought of it as a place for flirting and kissing, which were ‘the same thing as dancing’. She hadn’t heard of Godard...
Although she often responded to questions with anecdotes and talked about the role of chance and the necessity of pragmatism, Chantal Akerman was a fine theorist of her own work. She couldn’t understand why she was seen as an ‘intellectual’ filmmaker, but she has left a rich glossary with which to talk about her films.
Had Franz Schubert been asked how he had come to write the song ‘Am Meer’ – he, who had never seen the sea and whose knowledge of it was limited to hearsay and the stylised depictions of painting and literature – he might have answered as, a hundred years later, Maurice Ravel answered, when a friend teasingly asked him how, since he never got up before ten thirty, he...
Schubert’s imagination was unusually literary. Words released music in him: poems about desire, love, loss, solitude, the longing for rest; narrative ballads; philosophical poems; theological poems; poems about death; poems about nature; poems about the paranormal. Schumann reckoned that had he lived long enough, Schubert would have set the whole of German literature to music.
Time is fake, and it is the realest thing there is. You can’t avoid the evidence, even if you aren’t looking: only four days in a year are 24 hours long; before the industrial revolution the weekend lasted until Tuesday; the day your mother dies is not the same length as the day you do your taxes. We have created seasons and years, adolescence and senescence, stories that take...
Solvej Balle’s serial novel takes the idea of repetition and uses it to make these ancient, impossible problems of time new again. What is astonishing about her novel is the way she makes us see that we have constructed our world so we don’t have to think about time’s scalding realities.
Huey Long – Louisiana’s legendary governor, senator and would-be presidential candidate – loved the campaign trail. ‘Watch me vaudeville ’em,’ he would say, as he climbed up to the speaker’s platform. He looked, as one reporter put it, like a ‘circus hitched to a tornado’, and his wild gesticulations were accompanied by merciless mockery...
Huey Long – Louisiana’s legendary governor, senator and would-be presidential candidate – loved the campaign trail. ‘Watch me vaudeville ’em,’ he would say, as he climbed up to the speaker’s platform. His wild gesticulations were accompanied by merciless mockery of his opponents and generous helpings of common sense.
In August 2007, two months into Gordon Brown’s premiership, two-thirds of voters approved of his performance: one of the highest rates of satisfaction for any prime minister over the last twenty years. Labour was well ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. The Tory leader, David Cameron, was in a difficult phase, no longer a fresh figure after a year and a half in charge, and...
Brown’s premiership was left as a bit of a mystery: an example of formidable talent, experience and hard work somehow not being enough; and of a politician highly successful at reducing poverty nevertheless failing to connect with many of the beneficiaries of his policies.
The attack launched on Iran by the US and Israel on 28 February was a textbook case of international aggression, justified in only the most cursory fashion by fictional Iranian threats and undertaken with no clear aims and no clear demands or terms. In announcing the war Donald Trump described it as a wholesale attack on both government and state. The US and Israel would ‘raze their...
It may well be true that Israeli officials told the White House they planned to attack Iran with or without American help. But to suggest that the US has been led by Israel into a war in which it otherwise had no interest is to ignore US policy towards Iran since 1979 and the emboldening effect of Maduro’s removal. Nor should Israel’s usefulness to American power be dismissed.
What are the people in our lives really like – inside? Seeming and being may not be the same. Smiles may be false and vows of love insincere. Appearances are deceptive; you can’t tell a book by its cover; beauty is only skin deep. Yet, in ordinary circumstances, surfaces are all we have to go on. We do often infer something about books from their covers.
Physiognomy was the name...
The hand is an organ through which we know about the world, and in its expressive mode it helps others know something about us. But it might also be thought to contain information about the mind; it might, indeed, have information inscribed on it, making it a surface to be read and interpreted.
Remember perestroika? That was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated experiment in reform in the late 1980s which ended with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The perestroika story, as we read it in the West, was about an enlightened Soviet leader’s effort to democratise internally, while at the same time ending the Cold War. The first part failed; the second succeeded, but...
The Soviet Union had brought up its citizens as believers in scientific atheism, scornful of the tradition-based ‘superstition’ of the unenlightened masses before the Revolution. Yet by 1990 surveys showed that a majority of Russians gave some credence to astrology, telepathy, ‘supernatural forces’ and faith healing via the TV screen.
Just north of Oxford Street, at its eastern end, a dim entry called Newman Passage curves away from the plate glass and glitz into a silent Victorian alley. Wet cobbles gleam; the narrowing walls have survived slum clearance, redevelopment and the Blitz.
In one sense, the Paris Commune of 1871 – the mightiest urban insurrection in history before the 1944 Warsaw Rising – ended...
Solidarity with Commune veterans on the part of British working-class movements was usually more symbolic than active. Plenty of ‘Vive la Commune!’ and ‘Down with Capitalism!’, but no barricades or storming of town halls. Most people in the country had swallowed the ‘reptile press’ version of the Commune: the myth of ragged pétroleuses setting streets and palaces on fire, the mass murder of priests and nuns, the total abolition of private property.
Political scientists and psephologists are quick to warn us not to read by-election results as proxies for national outcomes. By-elections are so often an occasion to give the incumbent party a bloody nose. Yet it did feel as if the by-election in Gorton and Denton on 26 February was telling us something, less in the probabilistic way the number-crunchers warn against, and more in an...
Despite the misinformation and alienation that have led so many citizens to regard democracy in general with despair or contempt, a majority of people have a clear understanding of what Nigel Farage stands for, and an equally clear belief that it must be stopped. Even so, this is not a healthy place for a representative democracy to end up.
Around the year 1500, in Eisenach, Thuringia, a woman gave birth to a mouse. According to rumour, this ‘beautiful and virtuous’ woman had, during her pregnancy, encountered a dormouse on which a neighbour had tied a little bell to scare away other dormice. This unexpected vision imprinted itself on the foetus in her womb. In the days after the birth, news spread through the...
There is much room for improvement in today’s maternity care, but few in Britain would choose to give birth in 1506 rather than 2026, and an ultrasound, though magical in its way, is more useful than a crucifix pressed to the stomach. What remains unchanged is our desire to ensure the success of conception, pregnancy and birth, and our need to find ways of managing the fact that we cannot.
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 . . .
On Wednesday, 4 March, the Israel Defence Forces issued an evacuation order for the southern part of Lebanon – the entire area, around eight . . .
For months, I had watched our pile of firewood shrink. We didn’t burn it to keep warm but reserved it for cooking. Smoke got into everything . . .
‘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...
After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophistication which saw the emergence of elaborate townhouses for its mercantile and administrative elite, richly embellished with mosaics and wall paintings. But the city had stopped growing, and when a devastating plague arrived in about 165 AD, which may...
After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophistication which saw the emergence of elaborate townhouses for its mercantile and administrative elite, richly embellished with mosaics and wall paintings. But the city had stopped growing, and when a devastating plague arrived in about 165 AD, which may well have been Europe’s first encounter with smallpox, it was probably already on a long slow decline caused by its diminishing importance as a trading hub.
‘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 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...
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: Patricia Lockwood on Willa Cather, Ferdinand Mount on Raffles.
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