Sam Kinchin-Smith

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.

Why is the London Review of Books putting out records? We liked the idea of marking the paper’s 45th anniversary with a series of 45 rpm vinyl singles, and drawing on our rich archive of poems made sense (LPs of readings by Dylan Thomas or Stevie Smith used to sell by the bucketload). But which poems? There are thousands of contenders. A seven-inch record has space for about eleven minutes of spoken word, which is more than you get with music: the bass requires deeper and therefore wider grooves. Happily, this equates to a long-ish poem – the kind that takes up a whole page or even a double-page spread in the LRB – being read in full.

A Wound with Teeth, the first half of the choreographer Holly Blakey’s recent double bill at the Southbank Centre, reminded me of some of Paula Rego’s busiest paintings. It seems to come from the same dreamscape: deconstructed fairy tale costumes, densely arrayed symbolism, a certain shagginess of expression, animal heads, predatory gender relations (going both ways), triumphant victims, grotesque sexuality, maximalism, a powerful sense of mischief, an elaborate, multi-perspectival choreography of confrontations, subplots and cursed couplings.

Time-specific art extends the principles of site-specificity into the fourth dimension, by integrating circadian rhythms or extreme duration, say, into its performance language, or by staging a work to coincide precisely with when it’s set. There seems to be a lot of it about, at the moment, perhaps because it offers a live corrective to the always on, ever present homogeneity of digital culture. ‘The ephemerality and transitory nature is its power,’ as Séan Doran puts it. ‘You either got to it or you didn’t.’ Doran is the creative director of Arts Over Borders, who have just announced two new programming strands.

Mnemonic (at the National Theatre until 10 August) isn’t really a play about memory, or memory aids or triggers, though it’s quite insistent that it is. And its main narrative threads do function a little like memories, in that they assemble coherent stories from fragmentary records and resonant objects.

The coincidence of the centenary of Kafka’s death, on 3 June, and the publication of the first complete, uncensored English translation of his diaries a month before, is less straightforward than it seems. There are more obvious texts through which to tell the story of his last days.

The chance meetings, narrow escapes and spooky coincidences that fill Shakespeare’s romances are also a feature of the histories and provenances of the 235 surviving copies of the First Folio.

The bay of Elefsina, the modern name for ancient Eleusis, is a graveyard for ships named after gods and nymphs. 

What happens when you accidentally write a perfect song? You get a measly slice of the pie, is one answer – but also, possibly, the last laugh. That seems to be what’s happened to the Walkmen: the authors, though not exactly the beneficiaries, of the New York garage rock revival’s best song.

Earlier this year, two ice cores 125 metres long were drilled out of the Holtedahlfonna icefield and flown to the Ice Memory Sanctuary in Antarctica, so that climatic history can still be traced through Svalbard’s glaciers even after they’ve disappeared completely.