It was an anxious, analysed time, where everything was shifting and complicated except the enduring family romance, the troublesome siblings, the failure to escape the baleful relation with...
If you had been in St James’s Park on a fine February day in 1750, you might have seen a short, weary-looking man in his sixties tramping up and down the Mall, looking out for a plump...
The registrar at Chelsea Town Hall on the King’s Road said that anything I told him would be assumed to be true: a notice on the desk next to his computer monitor explained the dangers...
If Hardy was half a modern Londoner, the other half had a weakness for the pastoral-oracular. The two halves changed shape, feeding and modifying each other.
John Maltby, the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you...
The Soviet-subsidised mobile bookshops that enlivened my provincial childhood in the India of the late 1970s and early 1980s always had, in among the English translations of Marx, Lenin and...
It was June. I remember it very clearly. I can see myself walking down a side street between the Casbah and the European sector of Algiers towards the Victoria, a small, third-rate hotel. I climbed four...
It was the mention of chili con carne, an exotic dish in the late 1950s, on a menu at the exhibition about the Partisan coffee house at Four Corners Gallery (until 27 May) that provided the...
In November, a few days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, I flew to Arkansas to give a reading at the Fayetteville Public Library. I landed just before sunset. The earth was...
How he didn’t buckle under the weight of his circumstances, how he remained unbroken by such pain and loss, how, despite it all, he kept writing, would seem almost a miracle of fortitude were it not...
It’s a time capsule from the Mad Men 1960s, when rents were cheap, upward mobility was easier, magazines were thick and sassy, parties hung with a haze of smoke that spilled out into the streets and...
R.W. Johnson is a long-standing contributor to the LRB. His first appearance was on the letters page in 1981, where he took ‘mild issue’ with a review of his most celebrated book,
On the surface, we are far more privileged than our brethren in the West Bank and Gaza, but this is a façade behind which is a system of rampant structural and institutional discrimination. As Palestinians,...
You can’t have it both ways and both ways is the only way Ariel Levy wants it. Levy is best known for her portraits, in the New Yorker, of women who test society’s boundaries, or...
Murray Bookchin proposed anarchism as a natural partner to ecology. If the social world was understood as an ecological system, everything had equal value because it played its part in the whole.
Towards the end of the first year of Anita Brookner’s deathtime, I was remembering my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about: art, books, the literary world, France,...
Arthur Benson never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and...
Born in 1928, Maurice Sendak grew up in Brooklyn, the child of Polish immigrants. On the day of Sendak’s bar mitzvah, his father learned that his family in Poland had all been killed....