Queer London

Alan Hollinghurst

Homosexuality:​ do we really have to talk about it? Earl Winterton, aged 71, introducing a debate in the House of Lords in 1954, apologised for bringing forward ‘this nauseating subject’. In his youth it was never mentioned in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter...

 

Helen Garner’s Diaries

Anne Enright

In​ 1985, Helen Garner picked up the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature in a bookshop in Melbourne and examined its index to confirm that she was not in it. On finding she was right, she felt the world seesaw and walked away wretched. ‘I am crude, a beginner. People must laugh at me behind my back. I posture as a writer and at 42 I can’t even get into the Oxford...

Short Cuts

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....

 

What is liberty?

Colin Kidd

In​ a less frequented corner of YouTube, the late Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen lives on in a few comic skits. Among the funniest of these party pieces are two diatribes on ‘the German idea of freedom’. Cohen adopts the persona of a deranged Teutonic philosopher who claims that ‘no greater freedom can be imagined for a man than absolute blind submission to an unjust...

 

Renters v. Rentiers

Jack Shenker

How does anyone​ make sense of Britain’s rental crisis? Let’s start with Ruby’s story – and that of her landlord, which is inseparable from her own though they’ve never met. Ruby was born in Kent, where her mother had been sent to live as a teenager while under the care of a local authority in London, ‘a forgotten girl’, as Ruby called her,...

 

Janet Frame’s Place

Lucie Elven

Janet Frame​ didn’t like people writing about her. When they asked for interviews, she described them as ‘Porlock people’ (one biographer reported being ‘vigorously and efficiently rebuffed’). She believed she should be entitled to a private life, so she legally changed her name to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha – in honour of a Māori chief and the Clutha...

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.

At the Movies

‘La Haine’

Michael Wood

Mathieu Kassovitz’s​ film La Haine, regarded as a classic in many circles, is currently being shown in UK cinemas to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its release. ‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in...

 

Thatcher’s Failed Experiment

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

In​ 1981, in the wake of a budget that slashed government spending amid a steep economic downturn, 364 academic economists signed a letter to the Times. ‘The time has come,’ it said, ‘to reject monetarist policies,’ since ‘there is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring...

 

On Albert Barnes

Julian Barnes

When Kenneth Clark​, then director of the National Gallery, arranged to visit the Barnes Foundation in the mid-1930s, he knew to be careful. Albert Barnes was famously tricky and belligerent. Furthermore, Clark and his wife, Jane, were staying with an arch-rival of Barnes’s, Joseph Widener, who was, as Clark puts it in his memoirs, ‘a collector of the old style, so courteous as...

 

What William Morris Wanted

Michael Ledger-Lomas

Dante Gabriel Rossetti​ could always cheer himself up by belittling William Morris. At the top of a letter to Jane Morris in 1868, he scribbled a crest for ‘The Bard and Petty Tradesman’ in which Morris, plucking a lyre beneath a laurel tree, is back-to-back with his double, who is leaning over his shop counter. Sending up Morris as a hypocrite, intoning odes when he wasn’t...

 

How They Built the Pyramids

Robert Cioffi

Wadi el-Jarf​ lies two hundred kilometres south-east of Cairo on a pristine stretch of the Red Sea coast. It dates from the time of the pharaoh Sneferu, the father of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, who used it as a staging post for expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula in search of turquoise and copper ore. For the past 4500 years, it has lain dormant. To the untrained eye, the...

Diary

Whitney lives!

Andrew O’Hagan

On the eve​ of the first lockdown, I made my way to the Hammersmith Apollo to attend a performance by Whitney Houston. It was a chill, ominous night and the people outside the venue were wide-eyed and excited about their forthcoming encounter with the undead. I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and...

At the Barbican

On Noah Davis

Emily LaBarge

Born in Seattle​ in 1983, Noah Davis had just turned 32 when he died of cancer in 2015, but his vast canvases, painted in near transparent washes, cool tones and deep blacks, are the work of a mature artist. The Barbican retrospective (until 11 May) opens with a group of works made in 2007-8, a few years after Davis arrived in Los Angeles from New York, where he had cut short his studies at...

 

Tactile Dreams

Hannah Rose Woods

In​ the early 20th century, enclosed compartments gave way to open carriages on the London Underground. Passengers jammed together ‘like herrings in a box’, according to one contemporary commuter. People bunched up on shared seats or circumspectly distanced themselves from others. Those left standing looped their hands into straps and braced their bodies against the rhythms of...

 

Not Terminal

Stephen Sedley

It’s fourteen years​ since, without warning, my handwriting collapsed. Noting the oral arguments in the Court of Appeal in the final week before I had elected to retire, I found that I could no longer form the letter g. Other letters followed, until by the end of the week I was unable to produce more than a scrawl. Not even a treasured fountain pen could save it. It all became, as Anne...

Close Readings: New for 2025

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Partner Events, Spring-Summer 2025

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