From the next issue

‘Everything is possible’

James Meek

Disko​ bay 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 ...

 

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 ...

 

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 ...

 

D-Day and After

Daniel Lee

In June​ 1944, Field Marshal Rommel, widely regarded as Hitler’s most capable military leader, got caught out. Ever since his arrival in France, the Desert Fox had worried about the physical and mental preparedness of his troops. Like other senior military figures, he had criticised the luxurious lifestyle of German officers in Paris: their Etappengeist, the ‘spirit of the rear ...

 

Musk’s Twitter Takeover

Deborah Friedell

Elon Musk​ bought Twitter because he loved it. He loved tweeting poop emojis at dawn; he loved tweeting masturbation jokes at dusk. He loved that he had more Twitter followers than almost anyone else, though it galled that Barack Obama and Justin Bieber had more. While other celebrity social media accounts were often so sanitised that they smelled of chlorine – ‘Happy Tuesday ...

 

The Great Siege of Malta

Ferdinand Mount

‘Was it really the greatest siege?’ Catherine de Medici asked. ‘Greater even than Rhodes?’ ‘Yes, madame,’ the knight commander Antoine de La Roche answered, ‘greater even than Rhodes. It was the greatest siege in history.’ Catherine’s constable, Anne de Montmorency, had been arguing for Rhodes, but even he had to concede that more guns had ...

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Waifs and Strays

Mary Hannity

‘The human family’, Henry Drummond wrote in The Ascent of Man (1894), is ‘the starting-point and threshold of the true moral life’. Man carries ‘old wild blood in his veins’, while woman makes a home: her passivity is ‘the embryo of patience’. Children, closer to nature, need moral training at their mother’s side. As Florence Dressler wrote ...

 

Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Theft’

Blake Morrison

The theft​ in Theft isn’t a theft at all. Badar, working as a servant boy in a house in Dar es Salaam in the 1990s, is accused of adding groceries to the household’s weekly bill and selling them to accomplices. Nothing about Badar suggests he’d be capable of such a crime, and Haji and Raya, his affable master and mistress (terms they reject: ‘What is this Bwana ...

 

Marvellous Mavis Gallant

Tessa Hadley

It isn’t​ necessarily a good thing when a publisher brings out a writer’s uncollected stories. More is sometimes less. Barrels are scraped, doubts – often the writer’s own, if she or he is no longer around – are set aside; these stories may not have been collected for good reason, and reading someone’s weaker attempts can dilute the power of the rest. The ...

 

Versions of Marx

Peter E. Gordon

In November​ 1885, Friedrich Engels published an essay in the Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor ...

 

Barclay and Barclay

Daniel Cohen

There are​ people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘She loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore.’ ...

At Pallant House

On Dora Carrington

Rosemary Hill

The life​ and work of Dora Carrington have long been overshadowed by her death. As is often the way with suicides, later viewers find it hard to lose hindsight. For all the vivacity in many of her paintings, which seem to vibrate with joy in colour and form, she is often cast as a tragic figure. A less obvious factor in her relative obscurity is the obsessive cult of Bloomsbury. Lytton ...

 

Martin Crusius’s Project

Alexander Bevilacqua

In the late 16th century​, a stream of Greek émigrés passed through the south German university town of Tübingen. After recounting the indignities they had suffered (or claimed to have suffered) under Ottoman rule, some were allowed to beg at the church door or offered money from church collections. Others were turned away: after all, there was no way to check their ...

 

On Drawing

Julian Bell

‘Technically I didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water as it wasn’t in the bath at the time’ (2020) by Ray Ward

The verb​ ‘to draw’ refers to an act of pulling. Apply it to mark making, and two such acts come into view. A hand pulls a marker across a surface. Human intention, on some level or other, is involved. But the vessels of that intention ...

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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In the next issue: James Meek reports from Greenland.

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