When we left Malta for the Libyan coast twenty hours away, two birds followed us. We were crewing aboard the Minden, a decommissioned 26-metre German coastguard patrol boat on the lookout for...
May is much more Cameron’s mirror image than she is his antithesis. Politics is just as personal for her as it is for him.
In bnchs01 Carlo tells an old Mitch Hedberg joke: ‘Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool opotamus?’ bnchs01 is an audio file I recorded and submitted as part...
Not every Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, it turns out, has fits of conscience and bad dreams. Claretta and Mussolini seem to have felt pretty sanguine about their own actions.
In the category of premeditated deceit, imposture is for the real gamblers because it demands the broadest array of accomplices or dupes. If you’re pretending to be someone else, you...
Brunhilde Pomsel, one of Josef Goebbels’s secretaries, died on 27 January. I interviewed her in 1991 for a BBC TV series on Nazi film propaganda. In 2011, Bild ran an...
Most of the signs at the Women’s March on Washington on 21 January were hand-lettered, idiosyncratic, fierce, personal and often very funny. Hats off to the folks who thought up...
In his basement kitchen Raphael Samuel had a cabinet of curiosities, a glass-fronted corner cupboard filled with dusty objects. Among them, a lump of coal from the Durham coalfields and a...
Last June’s xenophobic campaign and the Brexit vote that followed have left Scots – even the most unionist – estranged from the idea of Britain. In the months before the...
Amia Srinivasan’s article in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
24 June. The day after the referendum, I spend sitting at the kitchen table correcting the proofs of Keeping On Keeping On, finishing them before going to Yorkshire in despair. I imagine this must have...
Acting came in handy. She knew how to cut a dash, draw the gaze, and deflect it. An air of vagueness – and a celebrated stuffed buffalo in the hall of her house – fed into constricted ideas about...
Each and every place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests,...
The balconied rooftop apartment in Zamalek on the island of Gezira which my father rented when we arrived in Cairo in 1947 looked over the Nile to the east and Gezira Sporting Club to the west....
At best, the incoherence can be interpreted as evidence he's a gormless, love-hungry child, a sort of feral president, as much the dupe in his own confidence scheme as he is its perpetrator.
Faced with the threatening possibility of hope, Beckett liked to get his retaliation in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this...
Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian-led government is facing its most serious crisis since coming to office in March 2015. In the small hours of 9 October, as many as five hundred people, armed...
In the winter of 1994, while I was living in the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, I decided to flee the sub-zero dry cold that grips the region for half the year by making the...