I was looking in the mirror and it occurred to me that jamais un coup de peigne n'abolira le hasard.
Mary-Kay Wilmers helped to found the LRB in 1979 and was its editor for many years. Her pieces have been collected as Human Relations and Other Difficulties. She is now the paper’s consulting editor.
I was looking in the mirror and it occurred to me that jamais un coup de peigne n'abolira le hasard.
Betsy Blair, a good friend of the London Review, whose charmed life was recently remembered in the New York Times’s 'The Lives They Led’, died last March. She once wrote a piece for the paper about informers, the FBI, the Hollywood blacklist and what you get when the FBI finally releases your file.
On Tuesday Sam and I went to see his doctor. We took the subway but weren't sure which train. A workman told us then asked where we were from. ‘You’re so lucky,’ he said when I told him we were from London. 'In this country the individual isn’t allowed to protect himself.’ Presumably that was a reference of some kind to gun control. Perhaps he thought we didn’t have it and he did. In the doctor's waiting room, the patient before us had thought she should cancel: ‘It didn’t seem the right day to be travelling into Manhattan.’ She'd come from Brooklyn. The doctor’s phone rang while we were with him. He looked at it and left the room. He came back smiling. The call was from his son’s elementary school. Two boys from the neighbouring high school had phoned to say there was a bomb in the building. The police were summoned, the school was evacuated, the children were allowed home.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, who retired as editor of the LRB last month, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her career, first at Faber and Faber, then the Listener, then for 42 years at the London Review of Books....
Stefan Collini talks to Thomas Jones about the life and work of Frank Kermode, and Mary-Kay Wilmers remembers him as a contributor to the LRB.
We look back at 40 years of the LRB in our anniversary event at Conway Hall.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, Andrew O’Hagan and Ben Eastham talk to Sarah Howe about ‘Long-Form Essays in the Digital Age’.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the LRB, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her book The Eitingons, a story of the twentieth century told through the lives of her ancestors: a fur-trader, a psychoanalyst and...
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