In his 2020 LRB Winter Lecture, Richard Lloyd Parry considers the paradoxical figure of Akihito, who abdicated in April 2019: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right.
Given what we know about the future of the planet, Meehan Crist asks: is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us?
Colin Burrow ranges from Homer to Ian McEwan in his search for the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction, in this LRB Winter Lecture.
We look back at 40 years of the LRB in our anniversary event at Conway Hall.
Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity.
Christopher Clark explains why the revolutions of 1848 weren’t failures, and why we should think about them now.
Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet and wonders why we're talking like this.
Rosemary Hill looks at women and clothes, and what happens between them, in life and literature, in her 2018 LRB Winter Lecture.
Anne Enright delivers her lecture on how corruptions of the Adam and Eve story have poisoned relations between men and women.
From Medusa to Merkel, Mary Beard considers the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded.
In her 2016 Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein examines how Said's ideas of racial hierarchy, including Orientalism, have been the silent partners to climate change since the earliest days of the steam engine.
Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916, following the main personalities involved, including Thomas Clarke and Patrick Pearse.
Frances Stonor Saunders inspects the complex apparatus of today’s border regimes and their obsession with the verified self.
James Meek argues how the Robin Hood myth has been turned on its head by the wealthiest and most powerful, so that those who were previously considered 'poor' are now accused of wallowing in luxury.
Will Self talks to leading translators Dr Anthea Bell, Dr Joyce Crick, Dr Karen Seago and Professor Amanda Hopkinson about the complexities of Franz Kafka’s German.