London Review of Books

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders

Amemory of my father spreading a map on the warm bonnet of the car, catching at its flapping corners in awkward gusts of Welsh wind. We are on a camping holiday, we are lost, and he is trying to tame the map so we don’t get loster. The high, solid hedgerows obscure the view and are not marked on the map. Nor are the wild raspberries that grow in the hedgerows. Nor is the weather. Nor...

In the Lab

Rupert Beale

On 29 July, I received ‘Coronavirus (Covid-19) update: issue 97’ from my university. I understand from dimly remembered friends and colleagues outside the Covidology bubble that 2020 hasn’t been much fun for them either. We’re all tetchy. Those of us who have been working round the clock on increasing testing capacity are also thoroughly exhausted. In March we ran on...

Diary

Getting into Esports

John Lanchester

Iremember, back at the start of lockdown, trying to draw up a rough mental ledger of things I would miss. The idea was to try and anticipate difficulties so as not to be blindsided by them. My list was heartfelt but unoriginal and consisted mainly, now I look back at it, of various blessings of city life that I had come to take almost entirely for granted. Seeing friends. Going for a walk...

One afternoon I watched twenty minutes or so of esports car racing, fell asleep, and then wandered off to do something else. I came back a couple of hours later and turned the telly back on to see if the race had finished. That’s interesting, I thought, the graphics have improved – not exponentially, but enough to notice if you’re paying attention. Then I realised that I was now watching a replay of an actual car race. I managed to hit the off button before falling asleep again.

Tom Crewe

Interviewees describe brown hotels, leaking holiday cottages, caravans, walks and pebbled beaches and fields. Some rapturously, some ruefully. ‘I remember thinking, as we arrived at the stationary caravan at the far end of a field in Cornwall, maybe this will be the year when it’s going to be exciting or exotic,’ one says. If you did venture overseas, overcoming material and psychological barriers (‘Darling, going abroad is vulgar,’ John Mullan’s mother told him), you usually carried Britain with you – tinned. When Eleanor Oldroyd and her family went to France in 1972 they took a can of baked beans for every day of the holiday, 21 in all; her mother fitted them ‘around the wheel arch in the boot, along with the tinned mince and tinned Campbell’s soup’. When Juliet Gardiner went to Le Bourget on a school exchange, she presented her penfriend’s mother with a box of cornflakes. Still, Abroad could be a revelation. Harry Ritchie, from Kirkcaldy, went to Majorca in 1969: ‘Being able to take your clothes off for a holiday, rather than having to put more on: that was wonderful in itself.’

Bridget Alsdorf

In Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence, facsimiles of James Tissot’s paintings hang on the walls of the Beauforts’ Gilded Age mansion, the setting for the annual Opera Ball, where New York plutocrats dance with women in Tissot-inspired dresses. An oversized replica of Too Early (1873) shows the sniggering that meets a group of early arrivals at a...

In the latest issue

13 August 2020

‘The Vanishing Half’

Joanna Biggs

‘Ihope the book gives you a sense of joy, something to immerse yourself in that is not the horrific news that we’ve been experiencing constantly and relentlessly since March,’ Brit Bennett said of her new novel. The Vanishing Half came out a week after George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was...

Tom Shippey

Over the last forty years, academics have tried, without much success, to superimpose the idea of the Vikings as peaceful traders on the berserkers-and-horned-helmets tradition. There is little disagreement about the events of the Viking Age or its timeline, stretching from 8 June 793 (the unexpected raid on Lindisfarne) to 25 September 1066, when King Haraldr Harðráði,...

Will there be a Brexit deal?

Anand Menon

Just before the EU referendum in 2016, the American political scientist Andrew Moravcsik wrote in the Financial Times that Brexit should be seen as a kabuki drama – ‘stylised but meaningless posturing’. Four years on, it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Even if the UK does manage to strike a deal with the EU, relations between the two have been...

From the blog

Beyond the Ruins of Hiroshima

Jacques Hymans

6 August 2020

Seventy-five years ago, on 6 August 1945, an American warplane destroyed the city of Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb. Over the following . . .

On John Hume

Daniel Finn

5 August 2020

The death of a notable figure is often a time for selective amnesia. Michael Gove is the Conservative politician with the keenest interest in . . .

Kashmir, One Year On

Skye Arundhati Thomas

4 August 2020

Tomorrow will mark one year since the Indian government abrogated Articles 370 and 35A of the constitution, which had provided a loose form of . . .

‘Easier prevented in the beginnings’

Paul Slack

3 August 2020

Quarantine has always been a political tool, imposed on citizens by governments. In 1631, Charles I received a report from one of his physicians . . .

‘H. and I are going to rebel’

Angelique Richardson

31 July 2020

The Life in the UK handbook boasts that Britain ‘became the largest empire the world has ever seen’ with railways ‘built throughout’ . . .

Lockdown, Lagos

Oris Aigbokhaevbolo

30 July 2020

As the city began to shut down in March, I decided to stay indoors. I had rice in one pot, tomato stew in another, mangoes in a bowl, carrots . . .

The Smallpox Precedent

Hugh Pennington

28 July 2020

Pharmacopoeia raiders are busy, looking for Covid-19 remedies that might be hiding in the long list of tried, tested and safe drugs. I did this . . .

Justice for Jayaraj and Bennix

Poorna Swami

27 July 2020

Since Narendra Modi announced a nationwide Covid-19 lockdown on 24 March, violators of the rules in India have been fined, abused, arrested and . . .

Podcasts & Videos

More Podcasts & Videos

Podcast

On Robert Frost

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

In the latest episode in their series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods. They discuss Frost’s difficult early life as an occasional poultry farmer and teacher, his arrival in England in 1912 amid the flowering of Georgian poetry, and his emergence as the first 20th-century professional...

Podcast

Brexit, Trump and Aldershot FC

David Runciman and Helen Thompson

David and Helen talk with the historian David Kynaston about his diary of the 2016-17 season in football and in politics, when a lot happened both to the world and to his beloved Aldershot FC. It's a conversation about loyalty, identity and belonging, and about what sorts of change we can tolerate and what we can't. Plus Helen reflects on her life as a West Ham fan.

Podcast

Press the Red Button

William Davies and Thomas Jones

Following his piece in the latest issue of the LRB, William Davies talks to Thomas Jones about the new political polarisation, and what it owes to the online culture of instant feedback. What does politics look like, Davies asks, once the provocation of reaction, positive or negative, precedes the slow work of excavation, research, reporting and administration?

They discuss the...

Podcast

To Leave and to Be Left Behind: Five Dials launch

Five Dials 57, ‘To Leave and to Be Left Behind’, explores the imaginative space of the journey – where it can take us and how it can change us. Guest-edited by Sophie Mackintosh, it brings together a range of playful, intimate and risk-taking voices from across contemporary fiction and poetry. To celebrate the launch of this special issue, Sophie was joined in conversation by...

Podcast

States of Shock

Pankaj Mishra and Adam Shatz

Pankaj Mishra talks to Adam Shatz about his latest piece for the LRB, which looks at the ways the US and UK have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, and what those botched responses reveal about the broader failures of Anglo-America.

Their discussion also touches on the recent ‘open debate’ letter to Harper’s, the lingering prevalence of...

Podcast

Everyone misplaces my keys

Amia Srinivasan and Thomas Jones

Amia Srinivasan talks to Thomas Jones about the long search for a third person singular, gender-neutral pronoun, and the resurgence of the pronoun debate in recent years.

Podcast

Lorna Goodison & Linton Kwesi Johnson

Writing on Lorna Goodison’s poetry, Derek Walcott asks ‘What is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvellous poems restore? Joy.’ Goodison has served as the Poet Laureate of Jamaica and published twelve volumes of poetry; her Collected Poems came out from Carcanet in 2017. In 2019, she won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Linton Kwesi...

Podcast

How do you change things?

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Adam Shatz

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks to Adam Shatz about the intellectual and historical background to the Black Lives Matter movement, and why she’s optimistic that the current protests might bring change.

Image shows the March on Washington, 28 August 1963 (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy).

Video

Is it OK to have children?

Meehan Crist

Given what we know about the future of the planet, is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us? Meehan Crist explores the debate about the ethics of childbearing in the age of climate crisis. She addresses the relationship between BP and the British Museum, the implications of culture-washing, and the logic of...

Video

Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan

Richard Lloyd Parry

Akihito, who abdicated in April, was a paradoxical figure: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right. Richard Lloyd Parry considers the former emperor’s part in the intellectual and political debate over Japan’s wartime record, and its...

Video

Fiction and the Age of Lies

Colin Burrow

The line between making a fiction and telling a lie has been blurry at least since Homer, and liars – from Odysseus and Iago to Austen’s Wickham and beyond – have often played central parts within fictions. This lecture will aim to tell some (though not all) of the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction from Homer to Ian McEwan, and will ask if fiction has...

More Podcasts & Videos

Good news from Bury Place!

We are delighted to announce that the London Review Bookshop has reopened its doors! For further details of how socially distanced browsing will work, visit the bookshop website. You can phone them on 020 7269 9030 to place a pre-paid order for collection, and they are once again talking orders via email or phone for international mail order. You can also order from a selection of booksellers’ favourites and lockdown picks online, via the London Review Book Box website. The Cake Shop is also back, for takeaway only, between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. from Monday to Saturday. Stay tuned for news of upcoming digital events, and we hope to see you very soon. Thank you for your support.

In the next issue, which will be dated 10 September: Paul Keegan on T.S. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale, Ian Penman on Kraftwerk, Susannah Clapp on Mecklenburgh Square.

Don’t miss the latest from the LRB: sign up to our newsletter.

Newsletter Preferences

Download the LRB app

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.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences