Benjamin Ivry works for Newsweek in Paris.
The Queen of Portugal has gone mad. Her madness consists of thinking herself in heaven. But heaven is below what she expected. She wanders around muttering, ‘Hmph!’
Hugo, Things Seen
Who has seen the sunflower has seen the sun, says Camoens in The Lusiade, but I hardly expected to see my duenna and her hairy mole, nor my maidservant dwarf, malodorous as ever, nor my...
For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, ‘To Go to Lvov’, in his first English-language book, Tremor (1985), I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the...
By the time Albert Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 the nuanced position he took on the Algerian revolution had caused a scandal in orthodox progressive circles. Camus kept...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.