London Review of Books

Jon McNaught has created more than forty covers for the LRB as well as artwork for books, diaries, posters and campaigns. In this film he takes us through the process of making a cover, from inspiration, sketches and photographs to creating the final artwork using various techniques and materials including watercolours, ink, chinagraph pencil, masking fluid, tape and scissors. He...

Crufts is the biggest dog show in the world with more than 24,000 toy, terrier, pastoral, hound, gundog, utility and working breeds entered for competition this year. For four days the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham becomes a different planet, with its own rules, language, celebrities and newspaper. But what lies behind the decision to favour one Pekingese over another? And with so...

Donald Trump recently announced a defence budget of more than one trillion dollars, much of which will be funnelled to private companies – and increasingly to tech firms such as Space X and Palantir.Laleh Khalili joins Thomas Jones to discuss the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. She explains the limitations of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, the strengthening grip of private...

When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was governed by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis’, of a system ruled entirely from the top down. Her examination of the ministry papers of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment after the Revolution, challenged this view,...

Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered the best French novel of the 20th century’, as Joanna Biggs wrote in a recent issue of the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, Joanna joins Tom to discuss Yourcenar’s life and...

Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 sections it explores the...

‘How useful is it,’ Daniel Trilling asked recently in the LRB, ‘to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism?’ In this episode of the podcast Daniel joins Tom to explore the question in light of his review of Richard Seymour’s book Disaster Nationalism. They discuss the continuities between earlier forms of far-right...

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...