Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog and presents the paper’s podcast.
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’s an 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,...
James Meek joins Tom to talk about a recent book by Peter Biskind on ‘the New TV’, reviewed by James in the latest issue of the paper. They discuss the rise of cable TV in the 1990s, the emergence...
Tom Crewe, Patricia Lockwood, Deborah Friedell, John Lanchester, Rosemary Hill and Colm Tóibín talk to Tom about some of their favourite LRB pieces, including Terry Castle’s 1995 essay on Jane Austen's...
Byron’s early poems – his so-called ’dark tales’ – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind. Clare Bucknell talks to Tom about her recent piece...
Adam Shatz explains how Albert Camus’s travel diaries shed light on his tumultuous personal life, his conflicted stance on colonialism and where his humanism deviates from his existentialist peers.
In June, the pope invited dozens of artists to Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum’s contemporary art collection. Patricia Lockwood was one of them. She tells Tom more about the surreal...
George Orwell wasn’t afraid to speak against totalitarianism – but what was he for? Colin Burrow joins Tom to unpick the cultural conservatism and crackling violence underpinning Orwell’s writing,...
When Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of fraud last week, the only surprise was how quickly the jury reached their verdict. John Lanchester joins Tom to discuss how the former crypto billionaire ended...
In Renaissance Venice, Aldus Manutius turned his mid-life crisis into a publishing revolution, printing books that permanently changed the way we read. Erin Maglaque tells Tom about Aldus’s achievements,...
Rosemary Hill explains how the 19th century’s obsession with Vesuvius spawned scientific disciplines, artistic innovations and nude picnics.
Daisy Hay joins Tom to discuss how contributors and their enthusiasms shaped the Oxford English Dictionary to this day.
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