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...
Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy – ‘the first attribute of God’ – explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church of the peripheries, and for everyone. It explains his off-the-cuff remark that he hoped Hell was empty, and the way he consoled a weeping boy worried that his non-believer father might not have gone to Heaven.
One afternoon last year I walked up a steep incline from Applecross Basin on the Forth and Clyde Canal, stopped under the second pylon I came to and looked out over the monochrome skyscape. I had been . . .
There are people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder . . .
Not many people born in 1929 are still productive, but Dominique Fernandez, winner of the 1982 Goncourt Prize for the novel Dans la main de l’ange, turned 95 a little before his new memoir, Les Trois . . .
This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my . . .
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.
At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. Whenever she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp.
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...
Writing about the White House by Christopher Hitchens, Jenny Diski, Stephen Greenblatt, Linda Colley, J. Hoberman, David Runciman, Michael Rogin and Colm Tóibín.
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...
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...
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.
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
Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again,...
For several decades, hard-right views offered the moral urgency and dramatic clarity Reagan craved. He regularly warned that welfare statism would lead the US to fall gradually into communism, like ‘overripe...
Isherwood wasn’t quite a social novelist, except he was. He wanted opposing parts of society to work together in his books, and these novels offer places where public and private life are seen magically...
Henry VIII’s relationship with his sister was never easy, and not made easier by her ready recourse to long letters that rarely achieved the level of sycophancy Henry expected, and were often written...
To understand the scope of the tragedy of Lisa Marie Presley, and why she couldn’t find her own identity or get out from under the loss of her father, you need to have some understanding of the scope...
The narrator of Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t sound like someone who’s intending to run for office – otherwise, presumably, J.D. Vance would have cut all those sentences about the laziness of poor white...
It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the first instance, see and feel what the Western Front was really like that drove him to...
Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being and nothingness. Any biography, however, has to decide in the end which of the various...
It has been said, with justification, that Kubrick’s films show a preoccupation with violence. Yet his interest is of a peculiarly unexcitable kind, whether the action is grinding, as in trench warfare,...
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon insisted that women should have the right to a career, for the sake of their souls, their families and society. Was she free to pursue the career she wished for? It would be...
Fools – men and women from incongruous, humble backgrounds – were dropped into the grand settings of Whitehall or Hampton Court to see what would happen. Their ‘naturalness’, or ignorance of convention...
The French Revolution soon turned into a rout of women’s rights. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code reaffirmed a husband’s authority over his wife and the Bourbon Restoration rescinded the right to divorce...
There has been an element of ‘infatuation-driven hyperbole’ in almost everything that has been said and written about Pauline Boty. In her lifetime her physical presence was always part of her reputation....
Her childhood in rural Warwickshire gave Comyns the material for her first book, Sisters by a River. It was essential to much of what followed in both life and work, though she was lucky to get out of...
As Seamus Heaney’s fame grew, and ‘the N-word’ (Nobel) added lustre, he attracted intrusive commentary. There were ‘feminist uppercuts’ and ‘Marxist flesh wounds’ from the academics. The...
Like the inhabitants of other small and remote countries, the Icelander has the choice to go or stay. Halldór Laxness did both. He was a cosmopolitan and a homebody. He yo-yoed. He stayed in Iceland and...
Each war speaks to every war, providing fresh testimony of nerves strained, hopes raised and dashed. And yet there is something tragically unusual – nearly unique – about these particular letters:...
Jo Ann Beard is a cunning craftswoman who draws circles and parallels across time, embedding patterns that unite seemingly disparate tales.
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