London Review of Books

Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany. When General Pinochet was himself arrested in London in 1998 under an international warrant issued by a Spanish judge, the British government returned him to Chile on medical grounds. In this...

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...

Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict apparently over, Adam Shatz talks to Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Robert Malley, a former lead negotiator for the US in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal,...

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around...

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,...

‘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...