Short Cuts

Labour’s Straitjacket

John Lanchester

Through the post​ arrives an artefact of a vanished civilisation, trailing that nimbus of mystery and sadness and forsaken possibility that belongs to reminders of a world we have lost. It comes in the form of a cheque from the state, made out to my son, for £1024. The cheque isn’t actually signed by Gordon Brown, but it might as well be. The Child Trust Fund was a New Labour...

 

Constance Debré’s Bravado

Em Hogan

Early inPlayboy, the first book in Constance Debré’s trilogy of novels about a woman whose life closely resembles Debré’s own, the narrator describes the feelings of intense boredom she began experiencing at a young age:

I gave everyone the shock of their lives when I was four. My great-grandfather the medical professor they named the hospital after insisted on me...

From the archive

Regime Change in the West?

Perry Anderson

Aquarter​ of the way through this century, regime change has become a canonical term. It signifies the overthrow, typically but not exclusively by the United States, of governments around the world disliked by the West, employing for that purpose military force, economic blockade, ideological erosion, or a combination of these. Yet originally the term meant something quite different, a...

From the blog

Not Based on a True Story

Jason Okundaye

14 April 2025

When Adolescence was released on Netflix last month, it was pegged as an incisive inquiry into the manosphere and the ways that misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate are poisoning the minds of young boys. In fact the series is quite light on that, beyond parsing some red pill emojis and making a few references to podcasts. Should all under-sixteens be banned from smartphones and social media? The proposal is fervently discussed even though it’s obviously unworkable.

 

Lethal Cuts at the DWP

Ed Kiely

‘Any physical or psychiatric disorder can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise...

 

When Peasants Made War

Malcolm Gaskill

In​ 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells to...

Give your mind a good stretch

Give your mind a good stretch

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

 

In Greenland

James Meek

Diskobay was dotted with small icebergs as I left the cottage I was renting in a small town in western Greenland one grey Sunday morning in early March. I sank up to my knees, having failed to work out where the safe path up the hill to the road was under the snow. People say the icebergs aren’t as big as they used to be. Somebody showed me a picture of Ilulissat from the 1990s, a...

 

Alia Trabucco Zerán’s ‘Clean’

Jordan Kisner

‘The defining feature of a tragedy is that we know how it will end,’ a character tells us towards the end of Clean, Alia Trabucco Zerán’s latest novel. ‘And yet, for some reason, we carry on reading.’ The book begins with a sense of brutal inevitability. An unknown voice speaks flatly in a silent room: ‘The end of this story – are you sure you...

Diary

Rome, Closed City

Inigo Thomas

Pina​ was shot dead on a street in Rome in the spring of 1944 on what would have been her wedding day. She was pregnant. Her fiancé, Francesco, arrested moments earlier after a German raid on apartment buildings east of the central railway station, was ordered into the back of a truck. Men were frequently rounded up during the German occupation of Rome, to be requisitioned as labour...

 

The Iranian Embassy Siege

Patrick Cockburn

Inthe late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat at 90 Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington Station, to walk across Kensington Gardens to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. I wanted a visa to visit Iran, where the US raid to rescue staff held hostage in its embassy in Tehran had failed disastrously a few days earlier. As I walked, trying to work out what to say to the Iranian press...

At the Whisky Bond

The Alasdair Gray Archive

Dani Garavelli

One afternoon​ last year I walked up a steep incline from Applecross Basin on the Forth and Clyde Canal, stopped under the second pylon I came to and looked out over the monochrome skyscape. I had been told that this was the spot where Duncan Thaw, the protagonist of Books One and Two of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, utters his most famous lines. ‘If a city hasn’t been used by an...

 

African Students in Britain

Gazelle Mba

William Ansah Sessarakoo’s​ father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in...

 

On Dino Buzzati

Michael Wood

Dino Buzzati​’s novel The Singularity was published in Italian in 1960 but set in 1972. Just a small leap into the future, but far enough for the second date to be that of Buzzati’s death. A coincidence, of course, but one that hints at meaning or design, as coincidences often do. We could say that life, for once, was mildly imitating his fiction, visiting his world of weirdly...

 

Victorian Snapshots

Tom Crewe

‘Carte de visite’ was a misnomer from the beginning. No one, it seems, ever left their photograph, mounted on a card about 4.5 x 2.5 inches in size, as proof that they had paid a call. People were too enthralled by this new technology to treat it so casually, and although cartes were relatively cheap, they were too costly to be sacrificed so blithely. Instead, photos were given to...

 

Cold War Pen-Pals

Miriam Dobson

In​ 1971, an elderly bookseller in Berkshire, Harold Edwards, began writing to the Aidov family in Moldavia. Slava Aidov was serving time in Dubravlag, a Soviet camp for political prisoners, and his wife, Lera, isolated and lonely, seized on the connection with Harold. Their correspondence continued for fifteen years. They talked about children and grandchildren, about the television they...

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 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’.

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