From the next issue

On Pope Francis

James Butler

Francis​ assumed the papacy in 2013 in the teeth of a crisis. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, the first pope in centuries to resign, was strongly associated with theological and ritual conservatism. His resignation was widely interpreted as an admission of defeat by proliferating sexual abuse scandals, which had shattered the moral authority of the priesthood, even among many of the faithful....

From the archive

The Francis Papacy

Colm Tóibín

The trial​ of Argentina’s military leaders took place in Buenos Aires between April and September 1985. The court heard evidence against the nine most senior figures in the regime, including three former presidents – Videla, Viola and Galtieri. Sittings began each day in the early afternoon and often went on until after midnight. The first official inquiry into the extent of...

 

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...

 

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...

 

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...

From the blog

‘You can read the writing on them’

Selma Dabbagh

23 April 2025

I asked Raji Sourani of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights if it was true that Gazans can hear the difference between a British drone and other drones. ‘Hear the difference?’ he replied. ‘You can read the writing on them.’

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...

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...

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...

 

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...

 

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...

 

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...

 

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...

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. 

Read more about Close Readings: New for 2025

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’.

Read more about Partner Events, Spring 2025

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