September 2025

Conor Gearty has died at the age of 67. He was a founder member of Matrix chambers and a professor of human rights law at LSE. His books include On Fantasy Island: Britain, Europe and Human Rights and Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law. His first piece for the LRB, in 1994, was on political sleaze (‘the Tories in particular looking with each passing year increasingly like a gaggle of white-collar criminals on day release for a family wedding’).

Every two years, the UK hosts one of the world’s largest arms fairs at the Excel centre in East London. The Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) describes itself as the ‘flagship event for the UK’, relied on by ‘the world’s leading defence organisations and most influential stakeholders … to bring the right people together’. It also brings together protesters in a network called Stop the Arms Fair, which has disrupted every DSEI since 2011.

One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George’s Cross, is ‘Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners’. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and ‘foreign’ women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted.

The LRB Diary for 2026, available now, is a tribute to Brief Lives by the 17th-century polymath John Aubrey (1626-97). It includes 55 excerpts from LRB pieces that, like Aubrey’s biographical sketches, may describe a life better in a single anecdote than is often achieved by an exhaustive catalogue of facts.

‘I am no longer able to process what is about to happen.’ The message from my friend Ghassan Abu Sita gets stuck in my head, going round and round, hanging between me and the sunny London streets, making me wonder again what I could be doing that I am not doing to try to stop this. What is happening has been clearly announced by the Israeli government: the eradication of Gaza City, of the north of Gaza. The displacement once again of a population that has been expelled multiple times with nowhere to go, with crippled access to food, water, shelter, the internet. More journalists and civil defence workers killed. More hospitals bombed. More young men killed by sniper fire as they try to reach aid or return with it to their families.

In the current exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute in London, the blending of Roman and Byzantine art is represented in spectacular form by ‘faithful copies of the ancient mosaics of Ravenna’.