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.
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,...
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...
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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