Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His books include Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World and Mother Country, a memoir. His essay collection, Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination, was published in March.
The catacombs under the Left Bank were originally part of a complex of stone quarries, built over as Paris spread during the 13th century. By the 16th century subsidence had become a serious concern and from the 1780s an ad hoc process of infilling began, with human remains from overcrowded or sinking cemeteries dumped in the galleries. Tourists now enter the catacombs near the metro...
This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Woodstock festival. Michael Lang, the tenacious 24-year-old who made Woodstock happen, has a habit of surfacing at Woodstock birthdays: one book to mark the tenth anniversary, another to mark the fortieth, a couple of namesake concerts and now a coffee-table volume of photos from the 1969 festival, plus brief explanatory notes. Earlier this...
The fire in Notre-Dame de Paris was extinguished in the small hours of 16 April. But residual heat from the blaze has left several brush fires smouldering.
Don McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain (until 6 May) is proof that it pays for a photojournalist covering victims of conflict and hardship to get up close: not quite eyeball to eyeball, but near enough to suggest a portrait. Most of McCullin’s photographs ask us to look frankly at the human face, and often our gaze is reciprocated. Even a dead soldier with the North...
When they gathered at roads and roundabouts at the end of last year, the French government was caught off guard. Within a week of their first nationwide mobilisation, they were turning out regularly at intersections across the country to slow up traffic, and marching through Paris and the big provincial cities. Hasty polls announced that 70 or 80 per cent of the population, including many in France’s largest conurbations, supported this massive show of impatience. Yet the gilets jaunes first came together beyond the margins of the major cities, in rural areas and small towns with rundown services, low-wage economies and dwindling commerce. They were suspicious of the burgeoning metropolitan areas. Among them are people who grew up in city centres but can no longer afford to live in them: these barbarians know where they are when they arrive at the gates.
Jeremy Harding talks to Tom about the long and resilient reign of King Hassan II of Morocco, and its repressive measures, as described in a new book by Aziz BineBine, who suffered 18 years of brutal detention...
Jeremy Harding discusses the politics of migration.
Elaine Mokhtefi talks to Jeremy Harding about her time working in Algeria in the 1960s when she met Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
In his latest book Heaven on Earth art historian T.J. Clark draws on examples from Giotto to Picasso to provide an exciting new history of the depiction of the divine. He talks to LRB contributing editor...
Jeremy Harding and Adam Shatz look back at their pieces for the LRB reporting from North Africa and the Middle East.
Jeremy Harding examines the work of Malian portrait photographer Seydou Keïta and the lively collaboration between himself and his sitters in the years before Mail’s independence.
Jeremy Harding talks about the politics of migration and the battle at Europe’s borders.
‘In olden times, which is when God was deciding what blessings he would give to the countries he was creating, after a long while he finally got to Angola and he asked Gabriel his angel to...
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