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.
It’s 6.30 in the morning and a bus full of passengers is idling in a town square. All is quiet in the January dawn except for the rumbling engine and the cry of a street vendor selling panelle (chickpea fritters). As the bus pulls away, the conductor spots a man in a dark suit running across the square and calls for the driver to wait. The man is about to jump onto the running board...
Occasionally when the phone rang at the London Review offices in the late 1990s it would be the operator asking if we’d accept a reverse charge call from Bill Johnson in Johannesburg. The first couple of times I checked with a colleague if it was OK to take it. After that I’d just say yes, put it on hold and call across the office to Mary-Kay Wilmers: ‘Big Bill’s on the phone.’ I never thought to ask where R.W. Johnson got his nickname; it certainly suited his voice. Yesterday the paper got an email from his son to say that Johnson had died at home in Cape Town. He was 82.
Before he took to writing thrillers in the early 1960s, Len Deighton, who died in March at the age of 97, had worked as a railway clerk, a kitchen porter, a pastry chef, a flight attendant and a commercial artist. Having completed his national service in the RAF he used his demob grant to study at St Martin’s School of Art, going on to the Royal College of Art on a scholarship....
Julius Caesar ‘invaded Britain in the hope of finding pearls’. Caesar Augustus ‘wore platform shoes, to make him seem taller than he was’. Tiberius ‘was left-handed, with joints so strong that he could push a finger right through a firm, ripe apple’. Caligula ‘never learned to swim’. Claudius ‘would never let anything come between him...
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...
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any...
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how...
In ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them....
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.
Since the 1980s, Brett Christophers wrote recently in the LRB, ‘firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South’ – hazardous waste...
Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers operated or grew up in America’s Pacific Northwest. Caroline Fraser’s book Murderland, reviewed...
One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and...
‘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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘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...
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...
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