Thomas Jones edits the LRB blog and presents the paper’s podcast.
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,...
On 7 May 1918, a man in Royal Flying Corps uniform presented himself at the gates of the Kremlin, claiming to be the personal emissary of the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, and demanding an audience with Lenin. He was persuasive enough to be let in and managed to talk his way as far as the chairman’s secretary, if not all the way to Lenin himself. Wary Bolshevik officials...
David Attenborough was born in 1926, the same year as Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro and Elizabeth II. He began hosting Zoo Quest on BBC television in 1954; not quite seventy years later, his latest series, Wild Isles, has just finished airing (it’s still available on iPlayer, or Amazon Prime for those outside the UK). It’s as magnificent as anyone could hope for from a BBC nature...
Is Giorgia Meloni Italy’s first fascist prime minister since the Second World War? Not exactly. The Italian constitution expressly forbids ‘the reorganisation in any form of the dissolved Fascist Party’. The constitution came into force in January 1948. The Movimento Sociale Italiano had been established more than a year earlier under the leadership of Giorgio...
Laleh Khalili joins Tom to discuss the case of Arif Naqvi, who for many on the right epitomises the idea of the 'woke capitalist', and what goes wrong when private equity firms look to profit from public...
Rory Scothorne joins Tom to discuss the evolution of Scottish politics over the past century or so, and how best to understand a country that’s shifted from a centre right electoral majority in the 1950s...
Miranda Carter joins Tom to talk about the life and historical fiction of Mary Renault, whose popular and ingenious retellings of stories from Ancient Greece have never been out of print. They discuss...
Azadeh Moaveni talks to Tom about the demonstrations in Iran following the killing of Mahsa Amini in September. They discuss the degree to which the protesters have a shared purpose, the history and significance...
Francis Gooding joins Tom to discuss Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber’s posthumously published study of 17th- and 18th-century piracy. Golden Age pirates maintained surprisingly egalitarian working...
With the future of TikTok increasingly uncertain in the US and other countries, Malin Hay talks to Tom about the app’s powerful reading-focused corner, BookTok: what it is, how it works, and the tropes...
Expanding on her recent Winter Lecture, Clair Wills talks to Tom about the stories people tell about abortions – stories conditioned by tradition, coerced by the courts, compelled by politics and shared...
William Davies talks to Tom about his recent LRB Winter Lecture, looking at how reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become the main currency of the digital public sphere.
Following his review of a new biography, Jonathan Rée speaks to Tom about Friedrich Hayek’s celebrity and infamy, and the ways close reading reveals surprising nuance in his work.
In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was on the cover of Time, the ‘First Lady of American journalism’ and a major celebrity. By 1945, she’d been widely dismissed as a crank.Deborah Friedell joins Tom to discuss...
Roald Dahl's key skill, as Colin Burrow puts it, 'was his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible'. Following his review of a new biography, Burrow talks to Tom about Dahl’s limitations,...
Laleh Khalili, a former management consultant, talks to Tom about how firms such as McKinsey, Accenture and Bain go about their business, the consequences of their relentless quest for ‘efficiency’,...
Madeleine Schwartz talks to Tom about the trial of twenty men accused of involvement in the Paris terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015, which left 130 dead.
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