From the next issue

Merkel's Two Lives

Christopher Clark

Angela Merkel​ was 35 when the country in which she had established herself as a research scientist ceased to exist. Once that happened, the transition was instantaneous: her career in science ended and her career in politics began. For nearly half of the period that has elapsed since that moment in 1990 – 16 out of 34 years – Merkel was at the apex of the German state. She...

Diary

Defending Mr Jefferies

Patrick McGuinness

Aweek​ before Christmas in 2010, a young woman called Joanna Yeates disappeared from her home in Bristol. I remember first hearing about it on the car radio, my attention snagged, as it always is when Bristol is on the news, because that’s where I went to school. The fact that Bristol is a big place has never prevented me thinking I know it well, but it was when the reporter mentioned...

 

Leningrad under Siege

Jessie Childs

At a canteen​ in Leningrad in December 1941, a man queued for two hours, handed over his ration card, received a bowl of soup and a bowl of porridge, ate the soup and died. A crowd formed around him, not out of concern but in the hope of acquiring extra food. Leningrad under siege was a pitiless place. Two in five people succumbed in the first winter and the streets were littered with...

 

President $Trump

David Runciman

Thespeeches American presidents deliver on the day of their inauguration don’t make much of a difference to anything. A handful have given resonant phrases to the language (‘The better angels of our nature’, ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’) but most are soon folded away and mothballed along with the event as a whole. Like the coronation oaths of medieval...

 

How to Measure Famine

Alex de Waal

In​ her short film, The Food Chain (2002), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay asked Israeli officials whether the people of Gaza and the West Bank were suffering from hunger. ‘The state is humanitarian. The army is humanitarian,’ Lieutenant Colonel Itzik Gorevitch of COGAT (Co-ordination of Government Activities in the Territories) told her. ‘First of all, there is absolutely no...

 

Why children’s books?

Katherine Rundell

In​ 1803, Samuel Taylor Coleridge sat in his astronomer’s study in Keswick, and wrote in his notebook his central Principle of Criticism:

never to lose an opportunity of reasoning against the head-dimming, heart-damping principle of judging a work by its defects, not its beauties. Every work must have the former – we know it a priori – but every work has not the latter, and...

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.

 

Caroline Blackwood’s Doubles

Ange Mlinko

The potential​ for drollery should be obvious: four females, confined in a luxury apartment on an upper floor of a Manhattan high-rise, moulder in rage and ennui when the head of household, Arnold, absconds to Paris with his new French girlfriend. The abandoned wife, J., swallows ‘fistfuls of Valium’ while staring bleakly out of the window. Monique, the young au pair, looking...

 

Climate Overshoot

Brett Christophers

Around​ fifteen years ago, a new term entered the climate change lexicon: stranded assets. The concept was straightforward enough. If global warming is to be kept from getting out of hand, there is a limit to the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted into the atmosphere. Yet the fossil fuel reserves currently held by the world’s energy and mining companies would, if extracted...

 

Versions of Hamas

Tom Stevenson

The history of Hamas​ is unintelligible without reference to the remarkable life of its founder, Ahmed Yassin. He was born in 1936, the year of the Great Revolt against the British, and his life followed a trajectory which in many ways reflected that of Palestine itself. In 1948 the village of his birth, near Ashkelon, was ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces and his family was driven into...

 

Ken Loach’s Fables

David Trotter

Philip Larkin​ claimed that sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. A better (if rhyme-busting) bet might have been 1965, when BBC One broadcast Up the Junction, a riotous group portrait of women at work in a Battersea chocolate factory and on the pull in Clapham, in its Wednesday Play slot. Mary Whitehouse, president of the...

Short Cuts

Chinese Fanfic

Yun Sheng

Since​ Trump’s re-election, worrying rumours have been circulating on Chinese social media: ‘AO3 might be in trouble. Trump wants to shut it down.’ AO3 (Archive of Our Own) is the world’s most popular website inspired by and dedicated to fanfiction – in China we’ve adopted the Japanese term doujin to refer to fan culture – and people from many...

 

On Jean Tinguely

Daniel Soar

Iwish​ I’d been there. On the night of 28 November 1970, in front of the Duomo in Milan, a sheet of purple drapery was removed to reveal a ten-metre-high golden penis, with a pair of massive golden papier-mâché balls on the plinth at its base. When darkness fell, a firecracker went off, and then another, as sparks and smoke issued from the tip, with louder explosions...

At the Movies

‘The Brutalist’

Michael Wood

Everything​ talks in Brady Corbet’s films, especially the scenes and objects that are silent. A snowy Italian mountain face seems to be some sort of fable, the Statue of Liberty appears upside down in an empty sky, the world spins at the end of a French motorcade as if it had gone crazy. Corbet likes to shoot cars at night, where we see mainly a dark screen, and just a few moving...

 

On Charles Villiers Stanford

Peter Phillips

Karl Baedeker​ wrote in his 1868 guide to Venice that when sitting outside the twin cafés of Quadri and Florian in St Mark’s Square, ‘strangers have here to submit to, with the best grace they can, the importunities of flower-girls, hawkers, musicians etc.’ He could have written ‘buskers’ – the word was in use by then – but he didn’t....

 

On Vigdis Hjorth

Toril Moi

Norwegians​ make a fuss about first books. The newspapers publish round-ups of the year’s literary debutants, who are invited to writers’ workshops organised specially for them. In 1983, two young authors met at one such workshop in Sweden. The first was a 23-year-old man whose Raudt, svart (‘Red, Black’) was being promoted as a ‘bleak and intense first...

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
Events

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