From the next issue

What energy transition?

Adam Tooze

Anyhope we have of containing the escalating climate crisis depends on getting to net zero, which will mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil will have to be replaced with clean energy sources. In the language of climate policy, this is known as the green energy transition and is often presented as the latest in a series of transitions...

From the next issue

In LA

Colm Tóibín

It was​ all sweetness verging on smugness. On the evening of Monday, 6 January we sat in the hot tub in the backyard and looked at the unfull moon. There were really only two small questions preoccupying me. Was that star actually Venus? And, also, was I wrong to feel slightly sad that the Christmas tree had finally been disentangled from its ornaments and was going into the garbage?

In the...

From the blog

Under the Santa Anas

Anahid Nersessian

13 January 2025

In last November’s election, a majority of California voters declined to outlaw forced labour among incarcerated people, who make up around 30 per cent of California’s firefighters and are paid between $5.80 and $10.24 per day. At least eight hundred of them are now up against LA’s infernos. What the state will not pay to provide it will extract through coercion.

 

Christopher Isherwood’s Artifice

Andrew O’Hagan

Ioncewitnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered opinions about Sergei Diaghilev and the Maharishi, with stop-offs at T.S. Eliot, Judy Garland and the queen mother. I had no time to roll my eyes because I was busy concentrating and trying not to...

 

Saints for Supper

Alexander Bevilacqua

Some time​ in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where frescoes of the Christian martyrs Cosmas and Damian had been painted on the wall. ‘Leaning on her faith as upon a stick’, she dug her fingernails into the plaster, then dissolved...

 

Your Majesty’s Dog

Alice Hunt

For Mendoza​, the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when Elizabeth I turned her attentions to the Earl of Essex. George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more...

Give your mind a good stretch

Give your mind a good stretch

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

 

Abbamania

Chal Ravens

In​ 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit on his leather jacket. ‘You’re my favourite band! I love you!’ a 20-year-old Sid Vicious slurred, as his idols were hurried to safety. Improbably, Vicious’s favourite...

 

Garth Greenwell’s ‘Small Rain’

Emily Witt

Many TVshows are set in hospitals, but fewer novels, at least ones that take place outside the psychiatric ward. Hospitals make for good drama: the path to diagnosis is a mystery plot with inherent narrative tension; the stakes are life and death. The best physician-novelists – Arthur Conan Doyle, Michael Crichton (who was also the creator of the show ER) – deploy technical...

 

Pétain’s Defence

Neal Ascherson

Theold man told my French nephew that he had something special to show him. Something he had thought best to keep in a drawer since 1943. In that village, families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon. It was a tiny statuette of Marshal Pétain. He...

Short Cuts

Trusting the Trustees

Thomas Jones

In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, Captain Tom Moore decided to try to raise £1000 for the NHS by walking up and down his garden in Bedfordshire a hundred times before his hundredth birthday on 30 April 2020. Donations reached the £1000 target on the 10th. The media seized on the story and more and more money poured in. Moore completed his hundredth lap on the 16th. By the...

 

They Came from Fox News

Eliot Weinberger

They came from Florida, from Fox News and Fox Business, square-jawed men and women with big hair and collagen lips.

They came from professional football and World Wrestling Entertainment.

They came from daytime talk shows and reality television.

They were ‘straight out of central casting’, as the future president said.

Some of the women resembled his daughter and some of the women...

 

The Exhausting Earl of Rochester

Clare Bucknell

Creative​ and destructive drives can be hard to tell apart. In Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, a poem about premature ejaculation, the speaker blusters about his penis’s usual prowess:

Stiffly Resolv’d t’would Carelesly invadeWoman, nor Man, nor ought its fury stayd –Where ere it pierc’d a Cunt it found or made –

Making and wrecking,...

 

Are we alone?

Edmund Gordon

There are​ approximately twenty billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think that up to a quarter of them are orbited by planets where water could be present; if the same holds true in other galaxies, it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that...

 

On the Pelicot trial

Sophie Smith

The French word​ for rape is viol. It signals the violence and violation inherent to the acts it names. Since early September, Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old Frenchman, has been on trial in Avignon for repeatedly drugging his wife, Gisèle, and raping her as she slept. He is also charged with inviting at least 72 other men into their home to do the same, on 92 occasions between July...

 

Antony v. Octavian

Michael Kulikowski

In the late summer​ of 32 BC, Rome declared war on Ptolemaic Egypt and its powerful queen, Cleopatra. In front of the Temple of Bellona, the Roman goddess of war, a member of an archaic priestly order called the fetiales cast a wooden spear into a small square of land that had been ritually designated as Egyptian soil. With the gods and Roman citizenry as witnesses, all appropriate legal...

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s revolutionary thought of the 20th century, truth and lies in the ancient world, and satire.

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Partner Events, Winter 2024-Spring 2025

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