The Editors

We have had a number of complaints about a post on the LRB blog on 6 July on the grounds that it was racist. The LRB does not condone racism, nor does the author of the post, R.W. Johnson. We recognise that the post was susceptible of that interpretation and that it was therefore an error of judgment on our part to publish it. We're sorry. We have since taken the post down.

In a 2003 piece for theLRBon Piero della Francesca, Nicholas Penny wrote: A fine example of their combined influence can be found in the entrance hall of London’s Middlesex Hospital, where the four large canvases of The Acts of Mercy by the now almost entirely forgotten Frederick Cayley Robinson are preserved beside the usual brash modern signage.

It has become clear from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that oil companies tend to underestimate both the size of newly discovered reserves and the difficulty of the conditions they will face when drilling for them. There's nothing new about this. Here are two passages from a review by R.W. Johnson of Christopher Harvie's Fool's Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil (1995):

The Sky News presenter Adam Boulton names his 'favourite hate figure' in the May issue of Total Politics: There's a classics don called Mary Beard. I think she's the worst kind of modern liberal. Or you could widen it to the London Review of Books.

Does anyone know where the line ‘When Dido went Aeneas-ing’ comes from and how it goes on?