Is Hayek to blame?

David Runciman

The​ Mont Pelerin Society was set up in 1947 with the aim of ensuring that the apparent triumph of freedom over fascism in the Second World War should instead be understood as a defeat. Inspired by its founding father, Friedrich von Hayek, whose rallying call The Road to Serfdom had been published three years earlier, the organisation believed that the price of victory had been too high....

Short Cuts

Labour at the Cliff Edge

James Butler

This month’s​ elections in England were significant without being surprising. They were dire for the Labour Party and cataclysmic for the Conservatives: neither has ever lost such a high proportion of the seats it was defending. The day belonged to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, which took 30 per cent in projected national vote share. Labour narrowly lost the Runcorn by-election to...

 

Mondrian goes dancing

Clare Bucknell

Piet Mondrian​ liked to claim that his life had been a straight line. ‘I started off as a naturalist,’ he told a journalist who visited his studio in Paris in 1922. ‘I soon felt a need for a more severe reduction and limitation of my means, and gradually became more abstract.’ He had an album of reproductions of his work on hand to show. ‘Things have slowed...

 

On Mário de Andrade

Adam Thirlwell

Máriode Andrade said that he wrote the first draft of Macunaíma in six days. It was December 1926 and he was staying at his uncle’s place outside São Paulo, lying in a hammock, smoking cigarettes and listening to the cicadas. The novel tells the story of the Pemon trickster Macunaíma, whom Andrade had read about in Theodor Koch-Grünberg’s five-volume...

 

Walt Whitman’s Encounters

Maureen N. McLane

Walt Whitman​ was a great recycler. He composts himself at the end of ‘Song of Myself’: ‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,/If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.’ Leaves of Grass became his lifelong project, expanding over decades. ‘Song of Myself’ appeared in all editions, pipped from the lead as he wrote...

 

Terrence Malick melts away

David Thomson

Terrence Malick​ is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. For decades, he has done his best to avoid being photographed. He isn’t a ‘known American’ or a spokesman for himself in the way of Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino, Spike Lee or just...

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Wartime Tories

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

When​ Neville Chamberlain declared war in September 1939, the Conservatives had been in power for a couple of decades, interrupted only briefly by the first two Labour governments. They had been in coalition for much of that time, but had always been the dominant party, and the government formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was...

 

The Pope and Pachamama

Colm Tóibín

Steve Bannon​ doesn’t like him. Before the conclave, he named Cardinal Robert Prevost as ‘one of the dark horses’ to become the next pope. ‘Unfortunately, he’s one of the most progressive,’ Bannon added. It is unlikely that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much...

 

At Crufts

Rosa Lyster

Every March​, over the course of four days, thousands and thousands of dogs go to a conference centre outside Birmingham. They arrive in waves, the dogs, according to the order in which they will be assessed. Breeds being shown at Crufts are divided into seven categories: hound, gundog, pastoral, terrier, toy, utility and working. The schedule changes every year, but this time the terriers...

 

Music Hall Lady Detectives

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Nevertrust a man who can’t settle, I thought to myself, as I was reading Hallie Rubenhold’s book. That was Hawley Harvey Crippen. No sooner had he found his feet in a new job than he was on the move again, whether out of eagerness, boredom, impatience or disillusionment, it’s impossible to know. Even reading about these moves is tiring. It must have been exhausting for...

 

The Trouble with Free Speech

Ferdinand Mount

It’spuzzling, unsettling even, to see ‘free speech’ rearing its head in public debate again, rousing passions which seemed long defunct. Wasn’t the doctrine definitively trumpeted by Milton and Locke, and knocked into some sort of final shape by John Stuart Mill? Even before you get to today’s remix of the debate, you cannot help noticing two features of it....

Diary

Safe and Unsafe Ports

Jérôme Tubiana

In​ 2019, I made several visits to Dhar al-Jebel, a Libyan detention centre better known as Zintan, after the nearest town. Around a thousand migrants, most of them Eritreans, were being held there indefinitely. Nearly all had been arrested by the Libyan coastguard in 2017, the year it began to receive EU funding to stop migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean, which was still a crime...

At the Royal Academy

Victor Hugo's Drawings

Julian Barnes

Victor Hugo​ was excessive, in life as in literature. Cocteau said that ‘Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.’ The critic and gardener Alphonse Karr wondered: ‘What was the point of going to all the trouble of becoming Victor Hugo?’ His English biographer, Graham Robb, wrote that Hugo’s life was ‘an inspiring lesson in the art of...

 

Hannibal and Scipio

Michael Kulikowski

In August​ 378 AD, the Roman army suffered a catastrophic defeat at Adrianople, near modern Edirne on what is now the Turkish-Bulgarian border. Tens of thousands of soldiers were slaughtered when the Gothic cavalry fell on the Roman flank. The high command of the eastern empire was almost completely wiped out and the Emperor Valens died on the battlefield, his body never recovered. Amid the...

 

On Forrest Gander

Stephanie Burt

Forrest Gander’s​ first collection of poems appeared in 1988. He grew up in Virginia and his early work seemed like that of an elegant regionalist. With cut-glass concision, he often took a long look at earth, rocks, landscapes. ‘If not a writer, then I would probably be a geologist,’ he said in 2005. He planned to study palaeontology, but was diagnosed with melanoma in...

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. 

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Partner Events, Spring-Summer 2025

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