LRB Readings

I get the sense that Jia Tolentino must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women, if she has ever met one.

Who are these women who work as surrogates, where do they do it, and how and why? What does it mean for sex and gender, race and genetics, nations and borders, binary sexuation, the existence and structure of the family itself?

‘No mind-altering substance has been described more thoroughly and from such a variety of perspectives,’ Mike Jay writes in his new history, Mescaline.

Her vision of Britain as a Singapore off the coast of Europe no longer has to be hidden. Some, indeed, hope it will soon become official government policy. Yet anyone who wants to see the coming Johnson administration as continuity Thatcherism should bear in mind that what is being channelled today is not Thatcher’s own record in office, but her views after she stepped down, which were different and much more uncompromising.

Diane Williams reads her story ‘How Much Did You Ever Think the World of Me?'

The trouble with ‘Who governs Britain?’ elections is that elections are no way to decide that question.

It’s a regret that no one ever found a way to harness his wild comic impulse. He was taken so seriously. He became a Hollywood actor, without ever trusting that system, or forgiving it for his weakness in succumbing to its temptations.

For much of this year, chaos seemed to be on the way out, as normal life gradually returned to former battle zones in both Syria and Iraq – unpropitious conditions for IS. But in October the situation changed.

It is the unheroic imperfection of the party system that makes it invaluable and normally invulnerable to anti­democratic demands for something purer and more disciplined.

Whether Hitler gets into our minds, or we mislay something of our own inside his, it’s clear that this strange and hateful man, who has been dead for 74 years, is still messing with our heads.

Diane Williams reads her story ‘Molly Went Along Quickly’.

It is the short-term incitements to ‘radicalism’ that the author brings to life. One essential component of its appeal was the hold on public affection of the institution of Parliament, a word that, as Cavaliers ruefully conceded, ‘carried armies in it’.

Framing ​a constitution for a country undergoing political upheaval is a messy and dangerous business, and it is by no means guaranteed to succeed.

Katherine Rundell reads her study of the swift.

One ​of the peace walls near the Falls Road in Belfast is decorated with a mural featuring several famous figures – among them, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. At its centre, though, five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie: Frederick Douglass.