London Review of Books

Laura Beers and Deborah Friedell talk to Tom about the recent decision by the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson, which removed the constitutional right to abortion. They consider the history of Roe v. Wade and its legal arguments, how abortion became such a partisan issue, and the possible consequences both of the ruling itself and the willingness of the current court to overturn...

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poetry, freeing themselves from the puritan American tradition.

Find all John Ashbery's poems published in the LRB here.

Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Sam Kinchin-Smith and Anthony Wilks

Bee Wilson talks to Tom about palm oil, which can be found in everything from pot noodles to shaving foam. In its purest state, squeezed from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm, it has a deep red colour and rich fragrance. By the time it reaches our supermarkets, in ultra-processed foods and cosmetics, it’s been refined, bleached, deodorised and relabelled, appearing in multiple...

How many Stanisław Lems were there? Five (at least), according to Jonathan Lethem.

Lem’s Solaris and Eden are works of classic Hard SF, in the tradition of H.G. Wells or Isaac Asimov. His Summa Technologiae, meanwhile, is a torrential magnum opus of speculative philosophy, which imagines the implications of virtual reality better than Mark Zuckerberg ever...

Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting required a sharp scalpel, a parallel-motion board and plenty of glue.

As the London Review of Books celebrates its 40th anniversary, we look back at what paste-up used to involve in the...

In this live episode of our partner podcast, Talking Politics, Hilary Mantel talks to David Runciman and Helen Thompson from our partner podcast, Talking Politics, about the politics of the Tudor court, revolutionary France, royal bodies and more, to mark the publication in paperback of ‘Mantel Pieces’.

The event was part of our...

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...