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.
Worried about security in London tomorrow? Maybe you should be. A month ago Lynne Owens, an assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had this to say to the Commons Home Affairs Committee, which was hearing evidence on the policing of the TUC march: we will be preparing to police any protests on the day of the royal wedding very robustly, but what we should remember is it is a different sort of event.
Escalate, an anonymous 'collective of writers and activists from around the University of London', has just published a stimulating Marxist analysis of the TUC march against the cuts: What happened on March 26? The official answer is clear: hundreds of thousands of ‘people from all walks of life’ marched for an ‘alternative’. Who in fact were they, and what are their interests? And what material recourse do they have against their managed impoverishment? Among all the cloddish asininities emblazoned in grim edible pinks across a million A6 flyers, not once does the TUC mention class. Its current agenda is one of banal inclusivity...
Everyone knows that Wikipedia is unreliable, though it's not clear where the evidence for that knowledge comes from – maybe it's on the internet somewhere – and a study in Nature a few years ago found that a random selection of science articles on Wikipedia sent out for peer review were nearly as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But maybe that simply means that the Britannica isn't as reliable as we used to think. So where to turn? Where else but Conservapedia, 'the trustworthy encyclopedia', started in 2006 by Andy Schlafly – according to Wikipedia, he's a ‘lawyer, conservative political activist' and 'teacher of homeschooling classes' – as a corrective to the 'liberal bias' of Wikipedia. Its list of 'popular articles' on the homepage include:
Besides scrapping the welfare state, the government's plans to return Britain to the Victorian age include 'High Speed Two (HS2)', a 'proposal to introduce high speed rail from London to Birmingham – and later to Manchester, Leeds and ultimately Scotland. The recommended route would run from a rebuilt Euston Station to a new station in Birmingham.' The Department for Transport is currently running a formal consultation, which includes a series of 'road shows in Camden to provide more information on the proposals and give you the opportunity to have your say'. The first of them is at Euston today, until 8 p.m. There's a vivid description in Dombey and Son of what happened to Camden when the London and Birmingham Railway was built in the 1830s:
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the intervention in Libya, the BBC could do with toning down the gung-ho jingoism of their coverage, not least in the photographs illustrating the story on their website. Explosions! Fireworks!!Planes!!! BRITISH planes!!!! When did they make Tony Scott director general?
‘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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