The Editors

W.G. Runciman, who died on 10 December, wrote 32 pieces for the LRB. The first, ‘On the State of the Left’, a review of The Forward March of Labour Halted? by Eric Hobsbawm, Ken Gill and Tony Benn, appeared in December 1981. The last, in January 2016, was a Diary about the regulation of the City of London. Others were on less serious (or should that be no less serious) subjects such as a review of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, published on 1 April 1983, which begins with an account of Malinowski’s anthropological method and goes on to consider its application to the inhabitants of SW3.

The documentary photographer Chris Killip has died at the age of 74. Best known for In Flagrante, his series of photographs taken in England’s deindustrialising north-east between 1973 and 1985, and published in a book in 1988, he also provided cover photographs for 19 issues of the LRB.

The Republic of Consciousness Prize for small presses has been won by Fitzcarraldo Editions for Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s novel Animalia, translated from French by Frank Wynne. Because of Covid-19, the £10,000 prize money this year is being divided equally between all the shortlisted publishers.

Archive footage of Alan Bennett and the late Jonathan Miller in their early careers as Oxford philosophers:

In the latest episode of the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman, Charles Arthur and Jennifer Cobbe talk about the impact of different online platforms on the general election campaign, from Twitter and Facebook to WhatsApp and TikTok. Is micro-targeting getting more sophisticated? Is viral messaging getting more important? Or are traditional electioneering techniques still driving voter engagement? They also ask if there's any scope left for a 'December surprise'.