Chastity or Fornication?

Lucy Wooding

Fewthings expose the potential for illogicality, hypocrisy and cruelty within the Christian tradition more clearly than its attitude to sex. Throughout the centuries, the struggle to comprehend divine instruction and apply it to everyday life has revolved with particular intensity around the question of what people might want to do, and what they should be permitted to do, in their sexual...

 

Dostoevsky’s Kiss

Daniel Soar

It’sa big book, some say the best. Freud: ‘The Brothers Karamazov is the most magnificent novel ever written.’ Einstein: ‘The most wonderful thing I’ve ever laid my hands on’. All the modernists were fans. Woolf: ‘Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture. Out of...

 

Linear Elamite Deciphered

Tom Stevenson

Decipherments​ of ancient scripts are often attributed, and sometimes misattributed, to individual scholars: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They...

 

Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind

Anne Carson

Thisis an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me. My responsibility to forms can’t be gracefully fulfilled. Nonetheless, I offer the following in the hope it does not strike you as dishevelled or...

 

Victor Serge in the Archives

Greg Afinogenov

‘Early on, I learned from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life is conscious participation in the making of history.’ In this line from the memoirs of Victor Serge – revolutionary, exile, implacable opponent of capitalism, critic and sometimes accomplice of Bolshevik terror – there is an entire worldview that is now as foreign to Serge’s...

At the Movies

‘I’m Still Here’

Michael Wood

The opening of​ Walter Salles’s haunting new film, I’m Still Here, places us a long way from its later concerns. The shots and action look like an energetic advertisement for Rio de Janeiro as a holiday destination, all beaches and volleyball and laughing children. When we move to a garden, the famous statue of Christ hangs like a blessing high in the air.

There are breaks in this...

Give your mind a good stretch

Give your mind a good stretch

Subscribe to the LRB this year – perfect for anyone with an interest in history, politics, literature and the arts.

 

Mis languages est bons

John Gallagher

Picture the scene​: it’s a few years after the Norman Conquest, and a man goes out to shoot deer in the New Forest. He’s breaking the law, as the right to hunt here is reserved to the Crown. The man is caught, and arrested – not by his own countrymen, but by ‘a group of armed jabbering foreigners’. Our hapless English hunter is forced to take a crash course in...

 

Miranda July’s Make-Believe

Amber Medland

Miranda July’s​ first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. July wrote, directed and acted in it, playing Christine, a fragile visual artist who moonlights as a taxi driver for the elderly. While ferrying a customer to a shoe shop, she notices a goldfish in a bag perched on top of a moving...

 

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan

Sir Paul Marshall​’s emergence as a right-wing media tycoon has been rapid. A decade ago he was a Lib Dem donor; now he owns the house journal of the Conservative Party. Immediately after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence. ‘You can have all...

Diary

Trapped in the Mine

Helen Sullivan

The miners​ first realised they were in danger when someone threw stones down the shaft. To communicate with people above ground, usually to ask for food, water or medicine, the miners would shake a rope and shout through a cut-off plastic bottle that amplified their voices. Family members or other miners would shake the rope and yell back. Supplies would follow. But for days there had been...

Short Cuts

Executive Hyperactivity

Aziz Huq

Russell Vought​, architect of Project 2025 – the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page compendium of extreme conservative policies – and now head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, explained a couple of years ago what a new Republican administration following his plan would do. It would, he said, ‘throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have...

 

Massacre in Damascus

Youssef Ben Ismail

In the summer​ of 1860, an unprecedented wave of sectarian violence swept across Greater Syria. Druze militias sacked Maronite Christian villages, killing eleven thousand people. Muslim mobs killed more than a tenth of Damascus’s Christian population in a matter of days. Churches and monasteries were burned to the ground, monks and priests were slaughtered, Christian women were...

 

Dressing the Revolution

Rosemary Hill

We alljudge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do...

At K20

On Yoko Ono

Frances Morgan

Yoko Ono​ has always understood the art – and the absurdity – of playing the long game. In 1989, she told Film Quarterly: ‘Do you know the statement I wrote about taking any film and burying it underground for fifty years? It’s like wine. Any film, any cheap film, if you put it underground for fifty years, becomes a masterpiece. After fifty years it’s...

 

On Dionne Brand

Andrea Brady

InA Map to the Door of No Return (2001), Dionne Brand makes the argument that ‘in the diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity.’ For Afrodiasporic people, captivity isn’t a condition, or a place, she argues, but an embodied memory, a haunting of bodies ‘curdling under the singing of whips, those bodies...

Close Readings: New for 2025

Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription in which longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. Discover the four new series for 2025 (with new episodes released every Monday): Conversations in Philosophy, Fiction and the Fantastic, Love and Death and Novel Approaches. 

Read more about Close Readings: New for 2025

Partner Events, Spring 2025

Check back for seasonal announcements, including the second concert collaboration between the City of London Sinfonia and the LRB, inspired by Edward Said’s ‘Thoughts on Late Style’.

Read more about Partner Events, Spring 2025
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