‘Ghost of a Girl with an Egg’ (2022) © Celia Paul. Courtesy the artist, Gladstone and Victoria Miro.
Celia Paul’s My Mother and God, from 1990, shows Paul’s mother, the obsessive subject of her art, against a louring cloud of thickly layered black and brown paint; at the top of the canvas, a glow of gold gives a promise of sunrise. The head seems...
Celia Paul’s writings give every impression of translucency and quivering confession; she is an artist of self-exposure, of hurt and sorrow, both on canvas and on the page. Her confidences inspire love and a desire to protect her and have given rise to something of a cult. But much is concealed as well as revealed.
Britain’s present economic bind began in the winter of 2021-22. The success of the vaccine roll-out over the previous months had made it possible to ‘reopen’ the economy, even in areas such as hospitality whose entire future had once looked uncertain. But bottlenecks in supply chains and labour markets then exerted an upward pressure on prices, including wages....
Whatever rash remarks he may have made about the bond markets or spending commitments, Andy Burnham understands something that Keir Starmer grasped too late: the unaffordability of everyday life has become the central issue in British politics, around which everything else revolves.
In her early 15th-century conduct book for women, Christine de Pizan advised a princess, not yet married, to ‘love her husband and live in peace with him, or otherwise she will have already discovered the torments of hell’. Tough advice for the 23-year-old Portuguese Infanta, Catherine of Braganza. Soon after her arrival at the Restoration court in 1662, as the wife of Charles...
Despite not securing the succession, despite being Catholic, Catherine, queen of Great Britain from 1662 until Charles’s death in 1685, managed to be perceived as an ideal consort. Royal wives were – and are – loved or loathed according to values that remain spectacularly unchanged: pretty (not too sexy), devout, dutiful.
Michael Longley died a year and a half ago, at which point, as Auden put it in his elegy for Yeats, ‘he became his admirers.’ As happens with any great poet, what those admirers had long appreciated as a succession of fine individual poems and volumes unobtrusively reorganised itself into the completed order of a life’s work. Perhaps some foreshadowing of this process was...
Michael Longley, who was all too familiar with protracted writer’s block, often spoke of precariousness in the sense that a poem might come but then again it might not. ‘I live from poem to poem, from hand to mouth,’ he said. But, he maintained, ‘surviving the silence – I should say the silences’ is what ‘separates the men from the boys’.
Northern Ireland is the most unstable part of the UK, where local battles escalate into draining crises for the British state. Although it has a reputation as a political volcano, between eruptions its internal dynamics are usually ignored in Britain and the Irish Republic. People in both countries are resentful that a place accounting for less than 3 per cent of the population of Britain...
What would happen if these two very different societies were united, when their institutions and attitudes have evolved in such different ways? What are the political, economic and social advantages and disadvantages of unity? How do their health and education systems compare? And how likely is it that unity, or even the prospect of unity, will provoke renewed violence?
‘You made a serious mistake by leaving Gaza,’ my friend Ibrahim used to say. ‘Come back!’ Ibrahim was one of the lucky few. Despite Israel’s blockade – which created the ‘worst economic depression in modern history’, as a World Bank report put it – Ibrahim had found a way to earn a decent living. We studied computer engineering together at...
Marwan Barghouti enjoys unparallelled popularity and is often described as Palestine’s Nelson Mandela. Like Mandela, he’s far from perfect, but his activism, his writings and his long imprisonment have made him a legend. Releasing Barghouti would be a step towards unifying the Palestinian leadership and energising the masses. But that is precisely why Israel will not release him.
Last September Nicolas Sarkozy was found guilty of criminal conspiracy. He went through the gates of La Santé prison in Paris a few weeks later. The judge found that in 2005 he had approved an agreement between his political aides and the Gaddafi regime for massive cash transfers from Libya into his campaign coffers for his crack at the presidency in 2007. Seven other people were...
For years politicians had taken it for granted that they could profit from the grey economy of French politics. Sarkozy’s mistake was to take it too far. He was unable to spot the difference between generating wealth and prestige for France as a ‘dynamic’ statesman and stashing cash for his own projects.
In early 2021, when the SNP’s chief executive Peter Murrell was being questioned via Zoom by a Holyrood inquiry into the Scottish government’s handling of harassment allegations against Alex Salmond, others on the call noticed that he kept looking off to the left. When asked why, he claimed he was being distracted by magpies. It was an odd and brazen thing to say, because he...
Peter Murrell squandered the SNP’s reputation on £42,660 worth of Amazon packages and a necklace from a Shetland jeweller that Nicola Sturgeon thought was a sweet gift. Outside the court, reporters argued over which of his purchases was the most humiliating: some thought the Ali Baba laundry basket, others the slouch pouch onesie.
This is what ‘Listen up’ sounds like when translated into pedantese: ‘Why, you brute nebulons, have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot yet tell how to edify an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities.’ So speaks one of the earliest representations of the pedant...
Guilt and pleasure are often codependent addictions, but for early modern authors the two were inextricable. The pedant offered the pleasure of verbal excess along with a guilty acknowledgment that the author himself might be no more than a generator of verbal excess.
One of the prized possessions in Margaret Busby’s childhood home in Ghana was a steel-grey transistor radio. For much of the year she and her siblings attended boarding school in England, but during the holidays the radio connected her to ‘other cultures, other musics’. In an essay written for the Radio 3 programme Free Thinking in 2008, now reprinted as ‘The Joy of...
Margaret Busby acknowledges the importance of anthologists and editors in championing overlooked or underrepresented writers, but also recognises that their selections sometimes give the impression of being definitive. In ‘Skin Deep’ (1966), she complains about ‘the agile self-appointed spreaders of enlightenment’ who suffer from ‘I-think-James-Baldwin-writes-marvellously syndrome’ and ignore other Black voices.
Taking British Communist art seriously means, to a degree at least, taking British Communism seriously. This is difficult to do when looking at Viscount Hastings’s mural from 1935, The Worker of the Future Clearing Away the Chaos of Capitalism, in what is now the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. The library is a 1960s reconstruction of an 18th-century school, which by the early...
Comparing Diego Rivera’s murals with Viscount Hastings’s work tells you a lot about the failings of British Communism. This is the art of a lesser offspring, the failsons of the October Revolution, always overshadowed by the mass Communist parties of Europe, of Asia, of Latin America. It would seem impossible to take the British part in all this seriously.
The defining characteristics of our political system – a parliamentary monarchy in a union-state – emerged in the course of two fraught decades at the turn of the 18th century, between the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland in 1707. The revolution of 1688 was glorious largely because – unlike the earlier revolution in...
Political uncertainty and the problem of communicating at a distance, especially between Jacobites in Britain and the exiled Stuart court on the Continent, supplied opportunities for amphibious behaviours of many sorts: double-crossing, spying for both sides and agile switches of allegiance.
The new MOWAA building in Benin City.
Given Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage – Nok, Igbo Ukwu, Ìfẹ́, Benin – it’s not surprising that it has 53 national museums, although it’s hard to say how many are currently functioning. In 1996 I visited the Owo Museum in Ondo State, attached to one of the oldest palaces in West Africa, only to be told by the...
Nigeria is a complicated recipient of Western largesse: elites welcome it so long as domestic players, for whom it may not have been intended, get their share. Among those elites are wealthy Nigerians who could rival Western donations to MOWAA if they chose to. They haven’t.
The epigraph to Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel is taken from Jung: ‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’ This might serve for any of Strout’s books, which repeatedly touch on loneliness and its causes....
Strout’s characters live in sociable communities, mostly small coastal towns, where everyone knows everyone else’s business. They gossip, reminisce, pontificate, form unlikely friendships, fall out with or in love with one another. Yet they feel alone, disregarded and misunderstood. They don’t understand others, either, even those closest to them.
As I waited for José in the only bodega within hours of the desert, a boy arrived on a pink bicycle. The cashier asked whether he was Venezuelan or Colombian. After more questioning, and a long silence, he realised that the boy, who looked about seven and was covered in powder from the salt plains, didn’t understand Spanish but rather spoke one of the area’s several...
I wanted to visit La Guajira to learn about the US airstrike on Venezuela but also to see genuine resistance. Under attack from the US, who better to turn to than a people who have preserved their languages and traditions despite centuries of colonialism? I didn’t find a template for defiance, but my trip did make clear its urgency.
The Met Police chief, Mark Rowley, recently announced that his force would be releasing more bodycam footage as standard. It used to be published . . .
Emma Hayes has described the difference between men’s and women’s football as cortisol v. dopamine. Under her management between . . .
Wearing a football jersey and waving the national flag, Abelardo de la Espriella trotted out the quasi-fascist trinity from the days of Operation . . .
Bill Clinton called the White House the ‘crown jewel of the federal penitentiary system’ but that’s not the way Jill Biden . . .
Andy Burnham has shown an awareness that the argument for more devolution, for the rebuilding of local government and the rebalancing of the . . .
The Thames may be cleaner than when it was declared biologically dead in 1957, but other rivers are close to ecological collapse, suffocated . . .
I arrived to take my exam after half the allotted time had already passed. I hadn’t been delayed by bombing, or even by a power cut, but . . .
With their immortal 0-0 draw against Spain yesterday, Cape Verde have now given me two truly great World Cup moments. On 11 July 2018, I was . . .
Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect the collapse of the Starmer project and the prospects for a Burnham administration, James is joined by Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times, and William Davies, a...
Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak...
‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is that a nostalgic illusion? The second competition, held in Italy in 1934, was a podium for Mussolini and, as Skinner puts it, ‘an early advertisement of the tournament’s...
‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the...
Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering the concepts of both work and play in the writing process. They then look at three poems that address workplace experiences. Valzhyna Mort’s ‘Factory of Tears’ and Robert...
Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by...
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which...
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising...
Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last week, Trump’s Board of Peace released a report complaining of a ‘funding gap’ after reports emerged that it had received only a ‘tiny fraction’ of the $17 billion its members had pledged to rebuild the region.
In this...
Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last week, Trump’s Board of Peace released a...
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every individual; in the US it’s more than $7000, and the majority of this exists in the highest-denomination banknotes, such as the $100 and €500 bills. So where is it all? Remarkably, nobody really...
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every...
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the time when computer games didn't even have screens, and in this episode he talks to Tom about the enormous changes generative AI has brought to programming and the world of work in the past couple of...
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the...
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and...
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in...
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second in Scotland (tied with Reform UK) and lost nearly 1500 councillors in England. But while Plaid Cymru and the SNP were victorious in Wales and Scotland, in many ways the results in England were a...
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped...
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession,...
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB. Last October, he set out on a road trip across America, with the aim of attending as many different kinds of criminal and civil trials as possible in one month. His journey took him from immigration...
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB....
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the...
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom...
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s Leo XIV has, but he may as well have done in his angry response to the American pope’s criticism of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran. With the US president’s supporters invoking the...
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s...
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River a ‘Hizbullah kill zone’.
In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in...
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’.
In...
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. To the Lighthouse (1927) marks perhaps her fullest...
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that its cause began to be understood, as scientists conducted experiments on dogs. It was a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto in the early 1920s who – through a gruelling series...
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century...
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us angrier and filling billionaire-owned social media sites with monetisable content? Sarah Stein Lubrano has argued that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is a myth and the best ideas often...
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us...
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in the LRB, Andrew O’Hagan writes: ‘All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and “loyalty” in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Ghislaine Maxwell took this young girl to...
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in...
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election last month, the prime minister has managed to cling on, for now. His critics point to a lack of vision in government, the alienation of Labour members and a failure to accept the need for...
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton...
In a press conference on 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Earlier that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the ongoing strikes were ‘just the beginning’. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Robert Malley and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj to discuss the chaos of Trump’s Iran strategy, whether...
In a press conference on 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Earlier that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the...
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible.In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has...
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an...
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’.On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio represented his models' bodies on canvas – their muscles, skin, hair, clothing and dirty...
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this...
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under fifteen kilometres per hour. Yet postal systems, as pioneered by the enterprising Tassis family, were becoming ever more reliable and efficient, at first in northern Italy and then across much of...
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under...
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the Iraq war, the London Review of Books held a debate: ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ The panel comprised Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Jacqueline Rose, Anatol Lieven and Onora O’Neill.President Bush’s ultimatum set the tone: either you’re with us or you’re with the...
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the Iraq war, the London Review of Books held a debate: ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ The panel...
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This is among the many extraordinary details of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein revealed by the release of more than three million pages of documents by the US Justice Department last month....
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This...
In ‘The Light Eaters’ (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our ideas of plants as passive life forms. Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith explore Schlanger’s account of new research into plant behaviour. They examine the case for plant agency – and...
In ‘The Light Eaters’ (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our...
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? Seamus Perry considers the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and...
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and...
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long after that moved to the US where she became a naturalised citizen and joined the Communist Party.
The Mitford sisters wrote many books and even more have been written about them, but Carla Kaplan's...
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long...
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and...
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the...
For the final episode, host Daniel Soar is joined by Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson for a live discussion on the War on Terror and its aftershocks.
They consider the powers and techniques established after 9/11 and now being deployed by the US – in Venezuela, Minneapolis and beyond. What is the legacy of America’s ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East, and...
For the final episode, host Daniel Soar is joined by Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson for a live discussion on the War on Terror and its aftershocks.
They consider the powers and...
Hero and Leander was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a...
Hero and Leander was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us...
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller...
After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.’
On this episode of the podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss some possible answers to those questions. They talk about the history of companies...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment, Camus became a journalist in Algiers and planned his writing career around three concepts based on the figures of Sisyphus, Prometheus and Nemesis, a scheme that he never finished.
Jonathan Rée...
Albert Camus’s short life began in Algiers in 1913 and ended in a car crash near Paris in 1960. After being rejected from the École Normale because of a failed medical assessment,...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...
In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...
On the Close Readings podcast, longstanding LRB contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works.
Listen to our four new series running in 2026: Narrative Poems, Nature in Crisis, London Revisited and Who’s afraid of realism? plus a free bonus series, The Man Behind the Curtain.
Why is the London Review of Books putting out records?
We liked the idea of marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, and drawing on our rich archive of poems made sense. A 7-inch record has space for about eleven minutes of spoken word. Happily, this equates to a long-ish poem – the kind that takes up a whole page or even a double-page spread in the LRB – being read in full.
In the next issue: Ray Monk on Einstein.
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