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.
The second verse of Bob Dylan's 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' tells 'writers and critics' not to ‘speak too soon/For the wheel’s still in spin/And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’.' Dylan was smart enough when he wrote that to know that his own prophecies were as unreliable as anyone's.
In the latest issue of Genome Biology (thanks to Alan Rudrum for pointing it out) there's an angry open letter to George Philip, the president of the State University of New York at Albany, from Gregory Petsko, a biochemist at Brandeis, protesting against the budget cuts that have led to SUNY axeing its French, Italian, Classics, Russian and theatre departments. As for the argument that the humanities don't pay their own way, well, I guess that's true, but it seems to me that there's a fallacy in assuming that a university should be run like a business.
So England has lost out to Russia in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup. David Cameron's last minute slapping down of Michael Gove over school sports' funding was clearly too half-hearted to make a difference. Those secret plans to distribute tickets in lieu of housing benefit will have to be shelved. Cameron can perhaps console himself with the thought that he may be out of office by the time he gets his complimentary seat at the final in Moscow. Here's hoping. After all, as Sepp Blatter said, 'football is a school of life where you learn to lose.'
Maile Meloy’s first novel, Liars and Saints (2003), told the story of five generations of the Santerre family, Catholic French Canadians displaced to Southern California, and later dispersed more widely across the United States and the rest of the world. The book – chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, though that shouldn’t be held against it – begins with Teddy...
David Cameron has told the BBC that the phone call from Buckingham Palace announcing Prince William and Kate Middleton's engagement, which arrived during a cabinet meeting, was 'greeted with "a great cheer" and "banging of the table" from fellow ministers'. I bet it was: how obliging of the royal family to provide such a glittering distraction from the savagery of the spending cuts. And what a boost to the economy, too! Unless William's parsimonious recycling of his mother's engagement ring is a sign that they're planning a frugal ceremony at Bangor register office. Anyway, 'the timing is right now,' the second in line to the throne says. He surely can't mean that he was waiting for a Tory government, can he?
‘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 wonder...
‘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 we got here, and what happens...
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. For their first...
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 at first, joined...
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 in the LRB by...
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 centuries...
‘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...
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...
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...
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 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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