The Editors

'All intelligence agencies, no matter what controls they appear to work under,' Phillip Knightley once wrote in the LRB, 'are a danger to democracy.' Knightley, who died yesterday, wrote a handful of excellent pieces for the paper in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including a withering assessment of James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence, and a first-hand account of how the KGB monetised its archive when the Cold War ended:

On Castro in the 1950s: In July 1955, Che Guevara was introduced to Fidel Castro, who was organising a guerrilla invasion of Cuba, with a view to overthrowing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Guevara was soon asked to join the party of insurgents.

Ian Gilmour on the horrors of Heathrow, the last time they were proposing to expand the airport (LRB, 19 March 1998): Heathrow is the worst-sited major airport in the world. Probably no other country would be crazy enough to place its principal airport at a spot which, when the prevailing wind is blowing, requires all aircraft coming in to land to fly first over its capital, one of the world’s most heavily populated cities. And I am pretty sure that if any other country had committed such a blunder, it would not magnify it by building another airport next door to the original mistake.

This year’s #readeverywhere competition was dominated by babies, cats and mountains, so perhaps it was inevitable that the winners would buck all three trends. Congratulations to the three runners-up:

The first LRB Diary – A.J.P. Taylor on nuclear disarmament – was published on 4 March 1982. It ‘inaugurates a regular feature of the paper', Taylor's contributor's note explained. 'The Diaries will be by various hands. Clive James’s will scan.’ Since then there have been more than 800 Diaries on close to 800 subjects, many of them reporting from different parts of the world (few have scanned). Clicking on the image above will take you to an interactive map on which you can explore 100 of them.