London Review of Books

‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink.’ By the late 1990s, Abba ‘were basically tap water’. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Chal joins Thomas Jones to discuss...

In 1928, the V&A acquired a previously unknown portrait. It shows the Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. In all of the previous history of Western art, there is no other image like this: a man who had been born into slavery, shown as a gentleman and scholar. The museum presumed it was a satire —...

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there. Described as a ‘dialectical...

Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhere. He has also written more than a hundred pieces for the London Review of Books, from its seventh issue (in February 1980) to its most recent. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on...

This week on the LRB Podcast, a free episode from one of our Close Readings series. For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Said by Machiavelli to be the last of the ‘five good emperors’ who ruled Rome for most of the second century CE, Marcus oversaw devastating wars on...

Wynne Godley was by turns a professional oboist, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an economist at the Treasury and a director of the Royal Opera House. Yet at thirty he found himself ‘living through an artificial self’ and turned to psychoanalysis for help.

Masud Khan was a protégé of D.W. Winnicott and the darling of British psychoanalysis. He was also much...

Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the experiences of Gazans during Israel’s subsequent - and ongoing - devastation of the territory. 

More in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: Israel's Descent

Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after...

As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent years as tabloid fodder, less for her sporadic music career than for her highly publicised relationships with Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Scientology.In a recent review of her posthumous memoir, Jessica Olin celebrates Lisa Marie’s...