The Editors

Michael Wood on Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln (LRB, 20 December 2012): The film would be worth seeing for this performance alone. All the apparatus of a Lincoln portrait is in place, as it would have to be: the beard, the stoop, the hat, the long coat. It’s a bit like putting together a kit for dressing up as Groucho Marx.

Colm Tóibín in the LRB (19 August 2010) on Ratzinger's election and pontificate:

Just in from Cape, an advance proof copy of The Twelve Children of Paris, the second part of Tim Willocks's Mattias Tannhauser trilogy (out in May). The novel opens on St Bartholomew's Eve 1572. We especially look forward to reading about the 'de-limbings'.

The first issue of the New York Review of Books was published 50 years ago today, with contributions from F.W. Dupee, Robert Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, John Berryman, Elizabeth Hardwick, Oscar Gass, W.H. Auden, James R. Newman, Nicola Chiaromonte, Lionel Abel, Steven Marcus, Robert Penn Warren, Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, John Maddocks, R.W. Flint, William Meredith, Adrienne Rich, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Miller, Barbara Probst Solomon, Lewis A. Coser, John Hollander, William Phillips, John Thompson, Robert Jay Lifton, Midge Decter, David T. Bazelon, Marius Bewley, Dennis H. Wrong, Norman Mailer, James Ackerman, Richard Poirier, Jason Epstein, Nathan P. Glazer, William Styron and Gore Vidal.

David Runciman on Lance Armstrong in the LRB, 22 November 2012: Blood-doping was what gave Armstrong a shot at becoming one of the legends of the sport. But it is clear that in his own mind what made the difference was how he doped: he simply did it better than anyone else, more creatively, more ruthlessly, more fearlessly. He exploited the same opportunities that were available to everyone. For Armstrong, drugs added an extra element of competition to the sport: the competition to be the person who made best use of the drugs.