The Editors

A new edition of Boris Johnson: The Beast of Brexit is published today. The late Heathcote Williams composed his ‘study in depravity’ more than three years ago, when Johnson was still mayor of London: before the 2016 EU referendum, before Johnson’s careless talk condemned Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to an Iranian jail cell, before the police were called to a domestic dispute at his girlfriend’s flat, before he said his hobby was making model buses out of old wine boxes, before he became prime minister. But Williams’s portrait is as true a likeness of its subject now as it was then.

From John Sturrock’s introduction to his1978 Penguin Classics translationof Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris:
 

Notre-Dame is meant in part as a redemption of an architecture in eclipse. 

Tony Harrison reads his poem 'A Cold Coming' in 1991.

We announced the start of this year’s #readeverywhere photo contest with the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities, somewhat butchered; so to crown the winners, we’d better subject its closing paragraph to the same miserable treatment:

‘It is probably best not to take advice direct and unfiltered from the animal kingdom,’ Katherine Rundell wrote recently in the LRB – ‘but lemurs may be an exception.’ And so may rats, dogs, snakes, primates, wolves, sheep, pigs, cows, crows, ravens, double-crested cormorants, salmon, sharks and octopuses, according to the contributors to our second app-only special edition of the London Review (the 15 pieces are drawn from the paper’s archive), published to fill the four-week summer break between issues, and give those who’ve signed up to our sale of two cities (with the Paris Review) something to read, right away.