Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog and presents the paper’s podcast. He has been writing for the LRB since 1999, when he was an editorial assistant. Many of his pieces have been Short Cuts. Most of the others have been on contemporary fiction, though he has also written on Romantic poetry, the ancient Greeks and Romans, the climate crisis and Italian politics. He has lived in Italy since 2006. Game Theory, a novel, was published in 2018.
Enzo Ferrari in his first race, the 1919 Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb.
It was hot on the tarmac at Vallelunga, in the low thirties centigrade, though not as hot as it had been 24 hours earlier – when the mercury had been pushing forty – and the high humidity of the previous few days had dissipated too. A nice day for a drive, even if sweat was pooling in my...
During his martyrdom in 258 AD, St Lawrence, as he was being grilled alive by the Roman authorities, is said to have asked his persecutors to turn him over, since ‘I’m done on this side.’ He is consequently the patron saint not only of cooks but also of comedians – and a presiding spirit over his namesake Laurent Binet’s seriously silly and immensely enjoyable...
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...
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....
Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey David Graeber's work, from the theories of power he developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything...
As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of 26’, as the New York Times put it in 1912, following her successful...
Donald Trump recently announced a defence budget of more than one trillion dollars, much of which will be funnelled to private companies – and increasingly to tech firms such as Space X and Palantir....
Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered the best French novel...
‘How useful is it,’ Daniel Trilling asked recently in the LRB, ‘to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism?’ In this episode of the podcast Daniel joins Tom...
‘The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom to discuss how the new pope will have to...
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel...
In this episode of the LRB podcast, Neal Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on the journalist Claud Cockburn and about his own life and career, from his time as propaganda secretary...
In 2015, a vigorous response to climate change seemed possible: even fossil fuel companies talked about transitioning to cleaner energy. But exploration and exploitation of oil and gas reserves have continued...
‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the...
Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. His presidency left the United States a far...
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