Catastrophic Thinking

Geoff Mann

It’s​ easy to forget that this isn’t the first time the world has seemed to teeter on a precipice. ‘To the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer,’ Hannah Arendt wrote fifty years ago, reflecting on the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. Then, as now, an apocalyptic...

Diary

Desperate Midwives

Erin Maglaque

Before​ the invention of forceps in the early 18th century, a midwife presented with an irredeemably obstructed birth would insert a hook into the foetus’s skull to pull it out, or dismember it and remove its body in pieces. The foetus would – obviously – die, but the labouring woman might survive. The oaths women swore in labour were concerned with this problem of parting...

 

James Joyce’s Errors

Colm Tóibín

On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather...

 

French Short Stories

Paul Keegan

Maurice Blanchot​, represented in this anthology by the opaque and mesmerising ‘The Madness of the Day’ (1949), wrote that a story is not the relation of an event but the event itself. It seems true that short stories are often less easy to summarise than novels, with no need to tidy loose ends, or even any obligation to end, and that their content often communicates something...

 

Woke Capital

Laleh Khalili

When​ the conspiracy theorists, diehard Trumpers and (white) natalists gathered in London in May for the UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst...

 

Plant Detectives

Liam Shaw

The old​ Palais de Justice in Lyon is one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in France. Its entrance hall is flanked with marble columns, and winged lions prowl the architraves.Between 1845 and 1995, it housed the major courts for the surrounding region. From 1912, access to the world’s first official police forensic laboratory was gained by entering through a back...

Dive into the LRB

Dive into the LRB

Read the world’s best writing – from some of the world’s best writers. Subscribe to the LRB today.

Order Now
At the Courtauld

‘Art and Artifice’

Rosemary Hill

In the mid​-1990s, I bought a watercolour from a pleasantly ramshackle antique shop I used to frequent in Walmer. It shows two boats, a yacht and a two-funnel liner on a choppy sea, and has a hefty but cheap gilt frame. The painting is done in a flat, naive style, reminiscent of Alfred Wallis, though the colours are not like his and anyway it is signed. The initials ‘S.B.’ in a...

 

J.L. Austin’s War

Thomas Nagel

Among philosophers​ of the 20th century, John Langshaw Austin is not a cultural celebrity like Heidegger, Russell, Sartre or Wittgenstein. But for a period after the Second World War, he was the leading figure of the school of ordinary language philosophy that dominated Oxford, achieved substantial influence in the wider Anglophone world and left its stamp for a much longer time on the way...

 

Sebastian Barry

Michael Hofmann

I’ve been here before​, you think, I’ve seen this movie before: the detective, cashiered or retired or disabled, his one-time colleagues can’t let him go, there’s a three-quarters cold case they need his help with. And Sebastian Barry is a writer who in his darksome romances offers, perhaps even craves, proximity to popular films, to genre, to Westerns and war...

 

Naoise Dolan

Malin Hay

In​ the post-marriage era, what happens to the marriage plot? The marriage rate halved between 1991 and 2019, but fiction can’t shake its fondness for the will they/won’t they question, for love triangles and dilemmas. In her second novel, Naoise Dolan updates the form for the 21st century, recognising that for the perpetual teenagers of the 2020s, a wedding is just an arbitrary...

 

Elsheimer by Night

Nicholas Penny

For most students​ of art history today, the most exciting development in Italy – indeed in all of Europe – around 1600 was the revolutionary realism of Caravaggio. He established his reputation in Rome as a painter of still life and made a point of painting directly from nature: from fruit held by a studio lad, from his own facial expressions in a mirror, from a bird’s...

 

Alice Notley

Andrea Brady

Alice Notley​ was born in Arizona in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. One of her first jobs was transcribing broadcasts for Radio Free Europe: the work influenced her early poems, which incorporate verbatim phrases from the street and the news – a literalisation of John Stuart Mill’s claim that poetry is eloquence overheard. Transcription was a pragmatic technique, and a...

From the archive

Is it OK to have a child?

Meehan Crist

One evening last year, the Democratic member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was chopping vegetables in her kitchen while speaking to her millions of Instagram followers via livestream: ‘Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,’ she said, looking up from a chopping-board littered with squash peel. ‘There’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult.’ Her hands fluttered to the hem of her sweater, then to the waistband of her trousers, which she absentmindedly adjusted. ‘And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, should …’ she took a moment to get the wording right: ‘Is it OK to still have children?’ Her comment spawned a flurry of pieces on why you should or should not procreate. But the thorny question of whether it is OK to have children – a question about what we owe one another and what we owe the unborn – remains.

From the archive

Remembering Susan Sontag

Terry Castle

“At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. Whenever she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp: a one-woman posse, ready to drop anything at a phone call (including the classes I was supposed to be teaching at Stanford) and drive her around to various Tower Records stores and dim sum restaurants. Most important, I became adept at clucking sympathetically at her constant kvetching: about the stupidity and philistinism of whatever local sap was paying for her lecture trip, how no one had yet appreciated the true worth of her novel The Volcano Lover, how you couldn’t find a decent dry cleaner in downtown San Francisco etc, etc.”

LRB Reading

Simone Weil’s Way

Toril Moi

Simone Weil wanted to merge with the masses, to be anonymous and unobtrusive – a worker, a farmhand, a trade unionist, a soldier – one among many, working and fighting alongside others. Yet she found true solidarity hard to come by. Everywhere she went, she stood out. She was often the only woman; she was always different. The poet Jean Tortel notes that her purity inspired fear. Even her writings are not really about acknowledging the pain of others. They are, rather, about the complete eradication of the self in the service of the afflicted, who, precisely because of their affliction, have already had their own subjectivity obliterated. Weil’s only loving interlocutor is God. What about​ her ideas? There is no disputing their importance. Her thinking about affliction, attention, factory work, oppression and liberation, rights and obligations, and the need for belonging has been influential across political theory, moral philosophy and theology. She has inspired thinkers as different as Maurice Blanchot, Iris Murdoch and Giorgio Agamben.

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

Sisters Come Second

From the Marx Brothers to the Manns: writing about siblings from the London Review of Books, featuring Stanley Cavell, Jenny Diski, Adam Phillips, Andrew O’Hagan and Penelope Fitzgerald.

Read more about Sisters Come Second
Events
London Review Bookshop

Ian Nairn: Modern Buildings in London

5 September 2023 at 7:00pm
Sold out
London Review Bookshop

Kehinde Andrews & Afua Hirsch: The Psychosis of Whiteness

13 September 2023 at 7:00pm
Book tickets
London Review Bookshop

Danny Dorling & Vicky Spratt: Shattered Nation

21 September 2023 at 7:00pm
Book tickets
See more events

In the next issue: Clair Wills on Shirley Hazzard; David Bromwich on Gillray.

Don’t miss the latest from the LRB: sign up to our newsletter.
Newsletter Preferences

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences