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...

 

Conception Stories

Erin Maglaque

Many fairy tales​ begin something like this: a woman is alone in a garden, or under a tree, or bathing in a pond. She longs for a child and prays. She might carve an apple, spill a few drops of blood onto the snow or speak to a frog. Her wish comes true, and she gives birth to a child. But the story doesn’t end with the baby, because her prayer isn’t really a prayer but a...

 

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...

From the archive

Executive Order 14168

Judith Butler

In the weeks since his inauguration, Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders intended to undermine progressive law and, in some cases, the foundations of constitutional democracy itself. The impression, as the orders arrive one after another, nearly a hundred of them so far, is of a self-amplifying state bent on overcoming the rule of law and testing the limits of...

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...

 

On Compost

Fraser MacDonald

Not many​ Edinburgh residents collect beach-cast seaweed, but when a winter storm leaves a strandline deposit on Portobello beach, it feels to me like a gift or a visitation from another world. Seaweed has a wonderful benthic weirdness; it’s so rubbery and alien, yet when you add it to the compost heap it becomes velvety, almost ambrosial. In the 17th century, fistfights would break...

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.

 

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...

 

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...

 

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...

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...

 

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...

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...

 

Hold on to your teeth

Liam Shaw

The pain​ of toothache arrives long after the damage has been done. The process begins when bacteria in the mouth turn sugars from our food into acid, which etches the tooth’s enamel, allowing the bacteria to penetrate further. Only when they hit the nerve bundles at the tooth’s pulpy core does the sufferer become aware – all too painfully aware – of their...

 

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...

 

Anglo-Russian Relations

Jonathan Parry

One​ can imagine the dilemma this sound narrative history posed to a publisher looking for a catchy title. Even so, The First Cold War is an unhelpful one. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and Russia did not seek to divide the world between them and very rarely pointed weapons at each other. Russia fought almost two dozen wars after 1783, but only the Crimean War of 1854-56 and the...

Close Readings: New for 2025

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Partner Events, Spring 2025

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