Childhood memoirs in the LRB archive by Hilary Mantel, Richard Wollheim, Lorna Sage, Edward Said, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Rosemary Dinnage, David Sylvester, Jenny Diski, Sean Wilsey, Lorna Finlayson, Yun Sheng...
For Joseph Johnson, who was often described as being quiet at his own table, Henry Fuseli perhaps fulfilled that social role best described as ‘the unacceptable friend’, saying what Johnson could or would not say himself. The thought that he represented the bookseller’s Id is not perhaps too fanciful, given that on one of the crooked walls of the dining room Johnson hung Fuseli’s The Nightmare.
‘Is there anybody there?’ the Traveller asks in ‘The Listeners’, Walter de la Mare’s poem from 1912. It’s a question that at first seems to go unanswered, for the mysterious silent inhabitants . . .
According to the French revolutionary calendar, Year I began in September 1792 with the abolition of the Bourbon monarchy and the declaration of a republic. In the National Convention, the new legislative . . .
The Queen’s Dolls’ House, designed by Edwin Lutyens, was put on display at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. A twee descendant of Victoria and Albert’s Crystal Palace, three feet . . .
Ifirst knew Malcolm McLaren as a singer. His was the oily voice on ‘You Need Hands’, which appeared on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, a sort of soundtrack album released early in 1979. The . . .
Only the hardest heart would repress a twitch of sympathy. To live on the receiving end of so much gush and so much abuse, to be simultaneously spoilt rotten and hopelessly infantilised, how well would any of us stand up to it?
A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: how did I get here? And then the moment passes, and ordinary life closes itself around what had seemed, for a moment, a desperate lack.
Afew weeks ago I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed...
I cannot recall the crucial incident itself, can only remember how I cringed when my parents told me about it, proudly, some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’
I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life. My bedroom is white; white walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds. It’s the best I could do.
Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path, and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his.
Faust, despairing of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some acres from the sea.
Paul de Man was born in 1919 to a high-bourgeois Antwerp family, Flemish but sympathetic to French language and culture. He studied at the Free University of Brussels, where he wrote some pieces...
On a bitter cold morning in January 1939 Auden and Isherwood sailed into New York harbour on board the SS Champlain. After coming through a blizzard off Newfoundland the ship looked like a wedding cake and the mood of our two heroes was correspondingly festive and expectant.
Childhood memoirs in the LRB archive by Hilary Mantel, Richard Wollheim, Lorna Sage, Edward Said, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Rosemary Dinnage, David Sylvester, Jenny Diski, Sean Wilsey, Lorna Finlayson, Yun Sheng...
Pieces about Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Jane Boleyn, Christopher Marlowe and other royal bodies, by Hilary Mantel.
Iain Sinclair gives a tour around the area near his home in Hackney, London.
Bee Wilson talks through Alma Mahler’s life, music, relationships and anti-semitism.
Will Self visits Prague for a walking tour in search of Franz Kafka’s genius loci. In the film, Will visits several Kafka sights as part of his research for a digital essay for the LRB, ‘Kafka’s...
In the second part of their conversation, Olivier Roy and Adam Shatz discuss the deculturation of Islam, and why it has led to the radicalisation of so many second-generation immigrants and converts
In the first of two podcasts, Olivier Roy tells Adam Shatz about his experiences with the Gauche prolétarienne in the 1960s and his early travels in Afghanistan.
Anthony Wilks visits poet George Szirtes to find out about the story of Szirtes’ mother, Magda, a Hungarian photographer who survived two concentration camps and escaped Budapest for England with her...
Patricia Lockwood travels through the internet and wonders why we're talking like this.
Ihad planned to become a doctor – I imagined working in a hospital in a tropical country like Dr Schweitzer. I graduated in 1963, but being unable to afford medical school I joined the...
Taking a leap in the dark – and is this not what the bounding horses lining the ceiling of Lascaux’s axial gallery ask us to do? – Jean-Luc Champerret proposes that the grids act as frameworks for...
29 May, Yorkshire. I’ve lost count of the number of times on TV I’ve seen the sequence whereby a dead lamb is skinned and the skin fitted onto an orphaned lamb which is then foisted on a bereaved sheep...
At some point on a night out an older queen will swing down from the rafters to let you know you’re too late. Five, maybe ten years ago, he explains, it was much better here. The music was better,...
The literary stomach of the world is a goat’s, not a hummingbird’s, and Karl Ove Knausgaard knows it. He tosses us crumpled newspapers, cardboard cups, grocery lists – all the detritus that makes...
Sebald’s deep preoccupation is with what his character Jacques Austerlitz calls ‘the marks of pain’, psychological and physical, in human and other animals. These marks are indelible, and for some...
Who cared if it was a low-budget British production, the sort that still tours provincial towns, advertised in newsagent doorways: to sit in the dark, to chew down a hotdog with scalding onions, to watch...
George’s defenders cannot have it both ways. Either they take the king whole, hot and strong and stubborn to the last; or they have to sideline him as an endearing nullity. To present him as a great...
Reading books like this, I feel like a Philip K. Dick character in the grip of wild-eyed madness. I want to run around telling the authors to snap out of it, to stop wasting their time and their Sontag...
The great realisation of the Stan Lee era at Marvel was that heroes didn’t need to be paragons. They could be anxious teenagers with money worries, like Spider-Man, or members of a bickering pseudo-family,...
I am haunted by the figure of Rolanda Polonsky, walking through the hospital corridors. If my eight-year-old self had opened the doors that frightened me I might have found her, back then, exactly as she...
Thinking is what Arendt probably claimed to have been spending whole days doing: ‘the two in one’, ‘the soundless dialogue ... between me and myself’. She would be thinking, and she would be smoking;...
One of the last things Gertrude Beasley wrote before her disappearance in 1927 was an article called ‘I Was One of Thirteen Poor White Trash’. It came out in Hearst’s...
In Uwe Johnson’s work, perspective doesn’t come from a bird’s-eye view but from staying at eye level – from looking and never stopping. His characters are suspicious of any claim that there is...
Craxton liked small jokes, hiding the date of a painting in the label on a bottle of beer, or turning his signature into part of the pattern on a cigarette packet. His art had become a quest for colour,...
In Memory of Memory shows that the compulsive wish to remember and be remembered is in no way peculiar to the digital age. Maria Stepanova sees our obsession with genealogy websites, with social media...
When people in Louisiana say that a city will disappear, they don’t just mean that it will be taken over by industry, or abandoned after one too many hurricanes or floods. They mean that it will actually...
Richard Wright wasn’t interested in the structures of support or mutual aid that enabled black people to survive as a collective. He was drawn to outcasts and desperados who had fallen through the cracks...
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