LRB Cover
Volume 39 Number 1
5 January 2017

LRB blog 3 January 2017

The Editors
Derek Parfit

3 January 2017

The Editors
John Berger

2 January 2017

Thomas Jones
Iphigenia in Aulis Redux

MOST READ

22 January 1998

Derek Parfit
Why there is a universe

24 July 2003

John Berger
In Palestine

3 February 2005

Steven Shapin
How good is Château Pavie?

In the next issue, which will be dated 19 January, Clare Bucknell on Jonathan Swift, Adam Shatz on Fanon and Julian Barnes on the Shchukin collection.

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Alan Bennett

Diary

24 June. The day after the referendum, I spend sitting at the kitchen table correcting the proofs of Keeping On Keeping On, finishing them before going to Yorkshire in despair. I imagine this must have been what Munich was like in 1938 – half the nation rejoicing at a supposed deliverance, the other stunned by the country’s self-serving cowardice. Well, we shall see. More

Ian Penman

Bowie

People still get into knots about the ‘mystery’ of Bowie’s serial life-swapping in the 1970s, but he’d been pulling the same trick for years on the perimeter of Tin Pan Alley before he applied it to rock. A bit of sci-fi, a bit of up-in-the-air sexuality, a bit of scarves-in-the-air sing-along, a bit of an ‘Oh no he isn’t!’ panto vibe, and a lot of power chords. More


Susannah Clapp

Beryl Bainbridge

Acting came in handy. She knew how to cut a dash, draw the gaze, and deflect it. An air of vagueness – and a celebrated stuffed buffalo in the hall of her house – fed into constricted ideas about women who write books. Big brain or scatterbrain? Bainbridge had a fringe and was skinny; she looked like a chanteuse. Bingo: she was one of the dippy ones. She colluded with this. More

Adam Tooze

A General Logic of Crisis

The publication of How Will Capitalism End? comes when Wolfgang Streeck has positioned himself as the leading intellectual proponent in Germany of a Gaullist vision of Europe from the left. Now that his cards are fully on the table it is a good moment to try to answer the question: how did Streeck turn critical theory into a vehicle for the assertion of the primacy of the nation? More

Short Cuts
Andrew O’Hagan

On the Sofa
Kate Summerscale

Christmas Trees
Alice Spawls


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