London Review of Books

When Michael Dobson wrote about the printing of Shakespeare’s First Folio for the London Review of Books, he described it as a ‘series of headaches’. When we tried to replicate those 17th century methods to celebrate the anniversary of the First Folio with our own Shakespearean print, we discovered how true that was.

In this film, letterpress printer Nick Hand pulls apart the...

In her writing about food for the London Review of Books in the 1980s, Angela Carter found a potent subject for her unique combination of savage wit and political commentary. In the ‘piggery triumphant’ of modern foodism she saw a ‘hysterical new snobbery’ in which a kirsch roulade is photographed according to the conventions of pornography. In the history and origins...

Fabliaux were short, witty tales originating in northern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, often featuring crafty characters in rustic settings and overwhelmingly concerned with money and sex. In this episode Irina and Mary look at two of these comic verses, both containing surprisingly explicit sexual language, and consider the ways in which they influenced Boccaccio, Chaucer and...

If we want to decolonise the university, we first need to decolonise our imaginations. Many Black and Indigenous artists are wrestling with the legacies of colonialism, enslavement and environmental destruction. How do we reconstruct histories that have been lost or erased? And what futures can we imagine in a time of imminent catastrophe?Hazel V. Carby delivered this lecture as part of the...

Modern English speakers struggle to find sexual terms that aren’t either obscene or scientific, but that wasn’t always the case. In a recent review of Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue, Mary Wellesley connects our linguistic squeamishness to changing ideas about women and sexuality. She joins Tom to discuss the changing language of women’s anatomy, work and lives.

Mary...

According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic use of obscenities, though their precise meanings can sometimes be obscure. As a courtier to...

Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and...