LRB Cover
Volume 34 Number 10
24 May 2012

LRB blog 22 May 2012

David Patrikarakos
In Kolonaki Square

21 May 2012

Glen Newey
Spoofistry

18 May 2012

Peter Geoghegan
A Moment of Clarity

MOST READ

24 September 2009

Gareth Peirce
The Death of Justice

6 July 2006

Michael Wood
Freud’s Guesswork

4 June 1981

Mary Renault
Alexander the Greatest

In the next issue, which will be dated 7 June, Andrew O’Hagan on Hemingway, David Runciman on Britain’s oligarchy, Jonathan Littell on the seamy life of Ciudad Juárez.

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Malcolm Bull

Climate Change Ethics

For the benefit of anyone who has spent the past decade or so on a different planet, the most frequently asked questions about climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with rising temperatures, while natural causes of global warming have remained constant. Will it get warmer still? Very probably, though no one can accurately predict when or by how much. More


Layla Al-Zubaidi

In Syria

‘Welcome to Assad’s Syria,’ the signpost at the Lebanese-Syrian border still says, letting the visitor know who owns the country. The ceasefire had just been announced, but few Syrians I knew held out much hope that three hundred UN observers could keep an eye on the whole army. The journey from Beirut to Damascus by shared taxi takes less than three hours. For years I’ve come this way to visit the Syrian side of my family. It was clear that things had changed. Political talk among the passengers used to be limited to hushed complaints about the border police. More

Mark Ford

Pound Writes Home

By my count, though I may have missed a few, this is the 25th volume of Ezra Pound’s highly distinctive correspondence to see the light of day. The first selection of his letters, edited by D.D. Paige and culled from the years 1907-41, was published in 1950, when Pound was four years into what would be a 12-year sojourn in St Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, to which he’d been confined indefinitely after pleading insanity at his trial for treason in 1946. Paige’s selection introduced to the world madcap Ez the compulsive letter-writer, all hectoring capitals and italics and doolally spelling. More

Short Cuts
Christian Lorentzen


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