Thomas Jones

Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog and presents the paper’s podcast.

Short Cuts: Trusting the Trustees

Thomas Jones, 26 December 2024

In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, Captain Tom Moore decided to try to raise £1000 for the NHS by walking up and down his garden in Bedfordshire a hundred times before his hundredth birthday on 30 April 2020. Donations reached the £1000 target on the 10th. The media seized on the story and more and more money poured in. Moore completed his hundredth lap on the 16th. By the...

Short Cuts: Cosy Crime

Thomas Jones, 21 November 2024

In​ the mid-1980s, before they moved to London and formed Suede, Brett Anderson and Mat Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:

Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house....

‘Operai che pranzano (I bevitori)’ by Federico Starnone (1953), by permission of the Comune of Positano. Photo © Vito Fusco.

It’san uncompromising way to start a novel: ‘When my father told me that he’d hit my mother only once in their 23 years of marriage, I didn’t even reply.’ But the narrator is replying now, in the more than four...

Among​ the swords, daggers, scabbards, spearheads, shields, helmets, belts, cuirasses, trumpets, tombstones and portrait busts of emperors that you might expect to find in an exhibition entitled Legion: Life in the Roman Army (at the British Museum until 23 June) are a number of less martial, more everyday objects: louse combs, drinking vessels, tent pegs, manicure sets, games and, perhaps...

One​ of the minor characters in Mick Herron’s latest thriller is an ‘espionage novelist whose recent decalogy about a molehunt in the upper echelons of what she referred to as the Fairground had her pegged by some as the heir to le Carré – one of an admittedly long list of legatees’. It’s hard not to read this throwaway remark as a glancing,...

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