From the blog

‘Get out of there now’

Amjad Iraqi

10 October 2023

A number of analysts are describing Hamas’s assault as a ‘game changer’. This isn’t an overstatement. The attack will probably do little to roll back Israel’s siege of the strip, which will surely be reinforced with even more cruelty. What it has done, however, is shatter a psychological barrier as consequential as the physical one. 

 

Why do we pay tax?

Stefan Collini

Atax system​ is a political philosophy expressed in numbers. Although the introduction of a tax can seem to be just a matter of brute politics, public acceptance of a new imposition is affected by the extent to which a justification can be provided. Elements of economic theory usually figure in the argument, but there are also widely held, albeit conflicting, moral intuitions to appeal to,...

 

On Nagorno-Karabakh

Tom Stevenson

If one​ were designing an international system from scratch, it wouldn’t feature enclaves or exclaves. States are violent institutions at the best of times, given to feuds and to border disputes launched over the smallest provocation. Nesting part of the territory of one state inside another seems like an excellent way to increase the chances of things going wrong. But the existing...

 

Dictionary People

Daisy Hay

In my teens​ I walked to school each day past a red pillar box on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly...

 

Counting Americans

Kasia Boddy

William Faulkner​’s story ‘Go Down, Moses’ begins with a lengthy description of a man. But it’s hard to get a handle on him. If the drapes, pleats and price of his suit are all ‘too much’, his face is ‘black, smooth, impenetrable’. The story elaborates on these details but also draws attention to the fact that they fail to interest his...

 

Camus in the New World

Adam Shatz

Albert Camus​ hated travelling. ‘Fear is the price of travel,’ he wrote in his journal of an unhappy trip through Central Europe in the summer of 1935, where he found himself gripped by ‘an instinctive desire to regain the shelter of old habits’. For Camus, who had tuberculosis, travel abroad raised the prospect not only of psychic unease but of illness: ‘We are...

 

Charles Lamb’s Lives

Tom Crewe

Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.

I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the...

Diary

Florida under DeSantis

Darcie Fontaine

In​ the summer of 2011, I moved with my husband from New York City to Tampa, Florida. We had just finished graduate school and there were very few jobs going for academics. I was resigned to going back home to Wyoming, when I got a call offering me a two-year position as a visiting assistant professor at the University of South Florida, a large public university. I had never been to Florida,...

 

Mick Herron’s Spies

Thomas Jones

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,...

 

The Pope at War

Richard J. Evans

On​ 24 September 1943, following Italy’s surrender to the Allies and the subsequent occupation of Rome by German forces, Heinrich Himmler sent an order to Herbert Kappler, head of the SS in the capital city: ‘All Jews,’ it said, ‘without regard to nationality, age, sex or condition, must be transferred to Germany and liquidated there.’ On 16 October, SS...

Short Cuts

Vancouver’s Opioid Crisis

Karin Goodwin

Traci​ Letts first went to the Overdose Prevention Society’s drug consumption room in Vancouver in late 2019. Her own son, Mike, was in jail, but she was with a friend who was hoping to find her missing daughter. Letts’s suburban home isn’t far from the stretch of East Hastings Street in Downtown Eastside populated by fentanyl users who live on the street, their possessions...

 

‘Big Swiss’

Naoise Dolan

Greta,​ the narrator of Jen Beagin’s third novel, Big Swiss, is a 45-year-old American woman who lives in Hudson, New York. She has slightly deranged ideas about Europe. She’s convinced, for instance, that multilingualism is something Europeans achieve in order to make Americans feel bad. She also maintains that Europeans can be divided neatly into two categories: the...

At the Met

On Cecily Brown

Eleanor Nairne

The painter​ Cecily Brown offers a short biography on her website: ‘Born in London. Lives and works in New York’. But there is more to her than that. Her mother is the novelist Shena Mackay; her father was the art critic David Sylvester, though she thought of him as an ‘uncle’ until she was 21. She took life drawing classes at Morley College in the late 1980s, which...

LRB Reading

‘The Plague’

Jacqueline Rose

Ever since​ the arrival of Covid-19 – in Western Europe, roughly at the end of January – sales of Albert Camus’s The Plague, first published in 1947, have increased exponentially, an upsurge strangely in line with the graphs that daily chart the toll of the sick and the dead. By the end of March, monthly sales of the UK Penguin Classics edition had grown from the low...

From the archive

My Encounter with Sartre

Edward Said

Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned excelebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus.‘

LRB Diary for 2024

Mark the centenary of Kafka’s death with the LRB Diary for 2024: 52 ways of thinking about Kafka. From Kafka’s attention-seeking to Kafka’s clothes, Kafka and gay literature to Kafka and The Lord of the Rings, avail yourself of a weekly planner possessed by the spirit of literary genius.

Read more about LRB Diary for 2024

Twenty Years, One Hundred Books

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the London Review Bookshop, we’ve invited twenty writers to choose five essential books for the next twenty years. Browse selections by Ali Smith, Olga Tokarczuk, Mary Beard, Geoff Dyer and more.

Read more about Twenty Years, One Hundred Books
Events
London Review Bookshop

McKenzie Wark & Lauren John Joseph: Love and Money, Sex and Death

24 October 2023 at 7:00pm
Book tickets
London Review Bookshop

Amy Acre & Joelle Taylor: Mothersong

25 October 2023 at 7:00pm
Book tickets
London Review Bookshop

Mathias Enard & Chris Power: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

31 October 2023 at 7:00pm
Book tickets
See more events

In the next issue: Jonathan Coe on British comedy.

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