London Review of Books

Mary-Kay Wilmers, who retired as editor of the LRB last month, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her career, first at Faber and Faber, then the Listener, then for 42 years at the London Review of Books. She talks about working with T.S. Eliot, the importance of being teased, and how a joke by Alan Bennett changed her life.

The episode also contains extracts from...

This week David and Helen talk to Suzanne Heywood about her memoir of her late husband, Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood - the man who helped to run Britain for more than two decades, working with four different prime ministers. From Black Wednesday to Brexit, from the Blair/Brown battles to the surprising successes of the Coalition, Jeremy Heywood had a unique position at the heart of...

Raphaëlle Branche talks to Adam Shatz about her new book, Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? (Daddy, What Did You Do in Algeria?). In it, Branche investigates the experiences of French conscripts in the Algerian war, what they saw and did, and, more important, how they did and didn’t talk about it afterwards.

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Forrest Hylton talks to Thomas Jones about what’s happening in Brazil: the oxygen shortage in Manaus, Bolsonaro’s disastrous response to the pandemic, why Trump’s departure won’t hurt him, and the prospects for the left in next year’s general election.

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Hazel Carby talks to Adam Shatz about the increasing nationalisation of racial histories, and the way African-American studies in the United States have been influenced by ideas of American exceptionalism. She argues instead for a broader, global view of race and Afro-diasporic culture.

Carby explores these ideas in her review of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our...

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. Subjects covered in this freewheeling volume include art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death...

James Wood talks to Thomas Jones about Beethoven, drawing on his review of three recent books on the composer. They discuss some of the apparently immovable Beethoven mythologies – the keyboard pedagogy, the heroic glower, the many appropriations of the 9th Symphony – and the blend of Viennese tradition and radical invention which characterises his music, particularly the piano...