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...
Y ou 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.
T owards 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,...
A rthur 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...
B orn 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....
W hen 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.
I n 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...
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.
I n 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...
B runhilde 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...
M ost 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...
I n 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...
L ast 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...