The latest season of LRB Screen events at the Garden Cinema, London Reviewed – an exploration of visions of London created by non-British filmmakers – continues with the multi-award-winning Still Life (2013), a portrait of urban loneliness, the forging of connection and the kindness of strangers.

In a moving performance, Eddie Marsan is a council worker tasked with locating the next of kin when no will has been left by the deceased. When his office is deemed financially unviable and wound down, there is a final ‘case’ to be solved, which turns out to be close to home.

Introducing the film, and discussing it afterwards with regular host Gareth Evans, will be the film’s writer and director Uberto Pasolini, who was awarded Best Director at Venice for this work.

Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’ is one of the great English poems of the 20th century: a fearless, state-of-the-nation epic that he wrote after finding graffiti on his parents’ gravestone in Holbeck Cemetery, on the southern edge of Leeds.

To mark the 40th anniversary of its first publication in our pages, the LRB approached the celebrated Leeds-based theatre company Slung Low, with Harrison’s encouragement, about bringing the poem home to the cemetery for live readings. Harrison died on 26 September; after discussion with his family and longstanding collaborators, some of whom are involved in this project, the event will continue as planned, as a unique and fitting act of memorial.

We invite you to experience ‘v.’ through headphones in the very place that inspired it, ‘on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds’. Pay what you decide for tickets.

Close Readings is the podcast from the London Review of Books in which longstanding contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. In one of this year’s series, the writer and mythographer Marina Warner traversed the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin, in conversation with Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis.

But over twelve episodes, the tapestry Marina and her interlocutors wove was inevitably patchy in places and completely blank in others; the implicit canon of the fantastic could only ever be a partial one. This event, the first of its kind attempted (but perhaps it will become a Close Readings/Swedenborg tradition) is an attempt to fill in all the gaps, live! Marina, Adam and special guest Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books and author of Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel will assemble a complete taxonomy of the genre over 75 minutes, or fail heroically, either way completing the series in the process. The recording will be released as the thirteenth episode of the podcast at the end of the year.

China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An alignment between the three major petrostates – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia – no longer looks implausible. The outlines of a new Cold War are becoming visible, one which will be determined by a novel mixture of ideology, critical technologies, supply chains and control of energy flows. How will these geopolitical dynamics play out – and what will it mean for global warming?
 
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. A columnist at Foreign Policy and a regular contributor to the LRB, he also writes Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics and history. His books include Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world and Shutdown: How Covid shook the world’s economy.