Inigo Thomas is finishing his book about the art dealer Tomás Harris.
Just when you thought that international test match cricket couldn't get more gloomy – there's too much dreary test cricket – here is Graham Collier, the director of the England and Wales Cricket Board, explaining to the BBC why a test match had to be played so early in the English cricket season: We had broadcasting contracts in place. And I think it would have been wrong not to have tests prior to us playing in an Ashes series.
'WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with your input.' This the automated response you will get when you type the name 'Inigo' into Wolfram/Alpha, the new, know-it-all computational search engine that was launched last week. Is it more or less reassuring to know that some things remain uncomputable?
An obscure utopian novel published in Dallas in 1960, Alpaca is notable less for its depiction of an ideal polity than for the fact that it was written by the oil tycoon H.L. Hunt. ‘Except that I am slow, I am the best writer I know,’ Hunt once said. Alpaca is a South American country threatened with dictatorship, though Hunt’s fictional would-be dictator is a Communist, not...
James Maxton – Independent Labour Party MP, socialist, orator, Scotsman and the subject of a biography written by Gordon Brown twenty years ago – was not a successful leader, although some of his contemporaries in the 1920s thought he might become one. ‘Maxton was never a government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and his failure to achieve any high...
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.