Thomas Jones

Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog and presents the paper’s podcast.

One​ of the minor characters in Mick Herron’s latest thriller is an ‘espionage novelist whose recent decalogy about a molehunt in the upper echelons of what she referred to as the Fairground had her pegged by some as the heir to le Carré – one of an admittedly long list of legatees’. It’s hard not to read this throwaway remark as a glancing,...

Letter

Savage Face

5 October 2023

Describing the Parco dei Mostri at Bomarzo, Michael Dobson writes that ‘one cave has been sculpted as the mouth of a huge savage face, with a raised flat stone tongue that invites guests to enter and use it as a picnic table, eating while seeming to be eaten’ (LRB, 5 October). The photograph illustrating the piece is captioned ‘Cave at the Sacro Parco di Bomarzo’ but, though it is the mouth...

Lives of Reilly

Thomas Jones, 10 August 2023

On​ 7 May 1918, a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials...

On the Sofa: ‘Wild Isles’

Thomas Jones, 4 May 2023

David Attenborough​ was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK). It’s as magnificent as anyone could hope for from a BBC nature...

Meloni’s Moment

Thomas Jones, 20 October 2022

Is Giorgia Meloni​ Italy’s first fascist prime minister since the Second World War? Not exactly. The Italian constitution expressly forbids ‘the reorganisation in any form of the dissolved Fascist Party’. The constitution came into force in January 1948. The Movimento Sociale Italiano had been established more than a year earlier under the leadership of Giorgio...

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