LRB Films & Interviews

Short films, long films and interviews drawn from the pages of the LRB.

13 June 2025 · 12mins

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.

20 May 2025 · 10mins

James Meek looks at some of the political debate stirred in Greenland by the release of a Danish documentary earlier this year and considers why Donald Trump is so obsessed with owning the island.

‘Interest’ and reading in Jane Austen

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell, 13 June 2025

9 August 2024 · 08mins

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell look at Jane Austen's use of the words 'interest' and 'interesting' and the significance of women reading in her novels in this extract from their podcast series 'On Satire'.

5 June 2024 · 06mins

In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence Hogben, a New Zealand-born meteorologist and Royal Navy officer, describes the way this forecasting by committee worked, and why they very nearly chose the wrong day.

23 April 2024 · 18mins

When Michael Dobson wrote about the printing of Shakespeare’s First Folio for the London Review of Books, he described it as a ‘series of headaches’. When we tried to replicate those 17th century methods to celebrate the anniversary of the First Folio with our own Shakespearean print, we discovered how true that was.

10 April 2024 · 15mins

In her writing about food for the London Review of Books in the 1980s, Angela Carter found a potent subject for her unique combination of savage wit and political commentary. In this film, Marco Alessi revisits these pieces and, with Susannah Clapp and Edmund Gordon, explores their humour, style and intellectual background.

Between Mykolaiv and Kherson

James Meek, 13 June 2025

17 August 2022 · 11mins

James Meek reports from Mykolaiv and the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve occupied west of the Dnieper, and the Ukrainians try to push them back across the river.

Five Lems

Jonathan Lethem, 13 June 2025

29 April 2022 · 06mins

How many Stanisław Lems were there? Five (at least), according to Jonathan Lethem. This short film, adapted from Lethem’s recent piece for the LRB, takes a voyage into the Lem cosmos.

8 April 2021 · 1hr 22mins

Anthony Wilks's film traces the connections between the events of Eric Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany 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 the modern world along the way.

Old Ties

Alan Bennett, 13 June 2025

24 December 2019 · 02mins

Alan Bennett examines his wardrobe, in his 2019 Diary.

28 October 2019 · 15mins

Ben Campbell traces the history of the London Review of Books through its typography and cover art.

The Horror of Doubt

Jonathan Rée, 13 June 2025

12 November 2018 · 06mins

Jonathan Rée considers Kierkegaard’s unfinished work, Johannes Climacus, about a student who falls in love with thinking.