People vote irrationally in local elections, at least according to the standards of political scientists. That is, their vote is often motivated by factors outside the purview of local government. The dismal result for Labour in England’s local elections on 7 May was not predominantly a revolt over bin collections. It was strongly related to national revulsion for Labour, and to the...
Despite a few halting steps towards devolving power in Britain, England itself remains a profoundly centralised country, in which national politics always dominates. So why not send a national message? Keir Starmer implored voters to ‘choose progress over the politics of anger’. It is a classic Starmer line, all injunction and no argument. Why shouldn’t voters be angry?
One morning in the summer of 2016, a few weeks into the disorientating aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, my wife and I sat in a community centre in Poplar, East London with our baby son. Our three-year-old daughter must have been at nursery. The occasion was a ‘consultation’ hosted by Tower Hamlets Council on the ‘future of Children’s...
This is what distinguishes hyperpolitics from the mass democracy of the mid-20th century. Symbolic political gestures are now commonplace, but paid membership of organisations and parties has plummeted. The left has failed to find a replacement for trade unions as a basis for collective action in civil society. Political movements are easy to join, and just as easy to leave.
Two years after the end of the Civil War, William Seward, the US secretary of state, negotiated the purchase of ‘Russian America’ – Alaska – for $7.2 million, equivalent to $165 million today. The New York Times noted that the acquisition
includes the strip four hundred miles long, which extends down the coast, thus excluding a large part of British America from the...
From the 16th century onwards, as European powers feverishly colonised the world, the possibility of a Northern Sea Route connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Scandinavia to the Bering Strait, tantalised the Dutch and the British as an alternative to the southern routes to Asia and the Americas. But the route only became a reality in the Soviet era.
Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard from 1962 until his retirement from teaching in 2023 at the age of 91, has never shirked any opportunity to burnish his reputation as a conservative ogre. His interventions in the campus culture wars have been plentiful, memorable and clumsy. One particular cause of ire is grade inflation, which he blames on greater racial diversity...
Harvey C. Mansfield contends that modernity was not a slowly unwinding process, but emerged at a stroke in Machiavelli’s reframing of philosophy. By pricking the politically counterproductive pieties of Christianity and the equally misguided obsession with the ideal characteristics of ‘imagined principalities and republics’, he brought philosophy down to earth.
Before he took to writing thrillers in the early 1960s, Len Deighton, who died in March at the age of 97, had worked as a railway clerk, a kitchen porter, a pastry chef, a flight attendant and a commercial artist. Having completed his national service in the RAF he used his demob grant to study at St Martin’s School of Art, going on to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship. After...
The almost dreamlike movement of the story of The Ipcress File is at times closer to Ishiguro or even Kafka than your standard spy thriller. The trick is to give up trying to make too much sense of what’s going on and enjoy the ride – the sentences, the wisecracks, the atmosphere.
On 12 December 1884, Henry James took a break from writing the novel that would be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has...
Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling is a book about a city but it’s also a book about families and shows that even good parents can lose sight of their children. I was often reminded of Oliver Twist, another book about London and parenting, in which exploiters and fantasists turn out to be waiting in the shadows.
‘Iwant a husband who is between sixty and seventy years old,’ announced a Parisian classified ad in 1813. ‘If possible, I’d prefer a former nobleman whose misfortunes, which are regrettably common, ruined him. I want him penniless, desiring to give him at least 3000 francs of life annuity. In addition, he will have accommodation in my townhouse and at my table.’...
Claude Villiaume’s clients appear to have been happy to embrace the notion of arbitrary fortune. For men it turned matchmaking into a game, and helped to explain failure. Women, often steeped in romantic literature and epistolary novels, embraced it too: love should strike like lightning, suddenly and powerfully.
In the 1990s, high-quality counterfeit $100 bills began to appear around the world. The United States Secret Service, the agency responsible for investigating fraudulent currency, claimed that these ‘supernotes’ were printed in North Korea, though it wasn’t clear how the intaglio printer, cotton-linen paper and colour-shifting ink had ended up there. Even so, numerous...
Maritime trade has always had to negotiate geographic bottlenecks: the Suez Canal, for example, or the Malacca Strait or the Strait of Hormuz. Controlling these narrow passages, through which large volumes of trade pass, confers significant strategic advantages. Yet by the early 2000s, access to the dollar seemed to offer even greater leverage.
Proxies stand in for something or someone else: a press secretary stands in for a politician; the number of citations a scientific paper gets stands in for its significance; the rise or fall of Gross Domestic Product stands in for the overall health of the economy. The proxy is never a perfect substitute for the person or thing it replaces. At best, the two are reliably correlated; at worst,...
What’s the use of reconstructing past climates if climate change has ‘ruptured’ the connection between past, present and future? The controlled uncertainty of the climate proxies, each carefully checked against the others, has given way to the radical uncertainty of a future in which all bets are off.
‘Suburb in Havana’ (1958) by Willem de KooningArtwork © 2026 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London.Photo: Owen Conway. Courtesy Gagosian.
Willem de Kooning’s Suburb in Havana was painted in 1958. The canvas seems to have had its first showing at Sidney Janis’s gallery in New York, part of an exhibition...
Willem De Kooning’s Suburb in Havana is a counter-revolutionary painting. Well, of course. It is counter-revolutionary because it is counter everything, versus everything, lost in suburbia. It wants to show us how hard it had to work to get precisely nowhere. Why nowhere was where it wished to get to is a question it leaves to the viewer.
The cities most closely associated with modernism – Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich – are all European. A number of recent exhibitions have sought to broaden this geography. Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence, which opened at the V&A in March 2024, considered the incorporation of modernist ideals into the architecture of postcolonial South Asia and West Africa....
Rather than the manifestos and self-conscious rejection of inherited tradition seen in European art, Nigerian modernism – insofar as one can generalise about such a heterogeneous period – saw artists attempting to make sense of the convulsions of the 20th century while variously embracing and subverting traditional forms and those inherited from Europe.
One can go long stretches without reading a contemporary novel in which children are vividly present, but parents – old, decrepit, dying or recently deceased – have seemed inescapable of late. Gwendoline Riley’s recent novels are a case in point. In First Love (2017) the narrator, Neve, contends with her galling, gallivanting mother while coming to the realisation that the...
One doesn’t read Gwendoline Riley for plot; each of her books is an assemblage of episodes. She wields dialogue like a Swiss army knife, now corkscrewed, now serrated, but always coming to a short, sharp point.
In the 1938 edition of the Oxford Companion to Music, Percy Scholes defined composition as ‘the culmination of the mental and psychological process of a remarkable and inspired personality’. Even today, the notion of the Great Composer – the individual genius, whose inimitable music is an expression of a singular mind – still holds sway: the composers guaranteed to...
The notion of the Great Composer – the individual genius, whose inimitable music is an expression of a singular mind – still holds sway. By contrast, the men and women who composed the music discussed in Composers in the Middle Ages are usually anonymous, and their compositions are likely to be based on mathematical conceits no one could possibly follow in performance.
Julian Barnes’s latest book is full of broken rules. In the second chapter we’re invited to look back at his early novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which contained, along with much else, ‘a list … of subjects which should be banned from fiction on a temporary or permanent basis’. The narrator’s list, with which Barnes himself ‘largely...
Barnes could have called this work ‘Disappearance’ or ‘Disappearances’, but he didn’t. The implication of the bracket in Departure(s) is that we should not concentrate on multiple events unless we are ready to mix them up and throw them away.
Alittle more than a decade ago, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty organised a conference at the University of Chicago on the history and politics of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty had published an article four years earlier in which he argued that the science of anthropogenic climate change undermined assumptions about agency, experience and causation that are fundamental to the writing of...
The rise of democracy coincided with the transition from wood to coal, and decolonisation in the 20th century precipitated the growth of fertiliser consumption, air travel, motor vehicles and industrial agriculture around the world. ‘The mansion of modern freedoms,’ Dipesh Chakrabarty argued, ‘stands on an ever-expanding foundation of fossil-fuel use.’
In the month since the ceasefire on 8 April, Trump’s rhetoric has swung erratically between talk of total victory and apocalyptic ultimatums . . .
I rediscovered the power of abstract painting on a trip to New Mexico. From high above Albuquerque, the tawny, light-reflecting landscape stretched . . .
He said the boiler could be fixed but it would be better to replace it. He put the call to the supplier on speakerphone. We were told a new boiler . . .
Charles III’s state visit to the US occasioned a good deal of commentary either celebrating the ‘special relationship’ between Britain . . .
The successful passage of the 2026 Tobacco and Vapes Act into law is a major milestone on the journey towards achieving the tobacco endgame – . . .
Last Wednesday, the reporter Amal Khalil and photojournalist Zeinab Faraj were on assignment in south Lebanon when Israeli drones struck the . . .
J.H. Prynne has always seemed to me to represent the real potential of poetry, as an art that can encompass everything, every kind of feeling . . .
J.H. Prynne died on Wednesday at the age of 89, after a prolific life as a teacher and essayist, a loyal friend to his students and, above all . . .
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: James Butler on the local elections; Tom Stevenson on Afghanistan.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.
This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience. Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run.
