Not long before last month’s elections, dozens of workers (the youngest was 12) were burned to death in factory fires in Karachi and Lahore. Pakistan’s rulers were unmoved: there were...

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Policing the Police: The Black Panthers

Fredrick Harris, 20 June 2013

On 1 January 2009, around two in the morning, 19 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot in the back by a white transit officer in...

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Diary: State of the Russian Left

Kirill Medvedev, 20 June 2013

In the spring of 2011, a group of oil workers in Western Kazakhstan went on strike. They were working in one of the richest countries in the former Soviet Union, in dangerous conditions, in a...

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David Goodhart argues that the major problems with British society are primarily caused by immigration, but his conclusions far outrun the facts.

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Murdoch seems driven by insatiable ambition. He is never satisfied. Nothing appears complete, and the old man shows no sign of abandoning the struggle – especially as his heirs (his children) now publicly...

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Hanging on to Mutti: In Berlin

Neal Ascherson, 6 June 2013

The German public are pissed off with Angela Merkel’s governing coalition, but reluctant to let go of Mutti’s hand.

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That Assad’s government is on its last legs has always been something of a myth.

Read more about Is it the end of Sykes-Picot? The Syrian War Spills Over

Who owns it? Oil in Russia

Tony Wood, 6 June 2013

There is no shortage of turning points in Russia’s 20th-century history, from the October Revolution of 1917 to the German defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, to the overnight...

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Many of the sins that Haitian officials are accused of – dishonesty, incompetence, lack of transparency – are manifest in their accusers’ own practices.

Read more about What’s next, locusts? What Happened to Haiti

Smiles Better: Glasgow v. Edinburgh

Andrew O’Hagan, 23 May 2013

Can places, like people, have a personality, a set of things you can love or not love? Do countries speak? Do lakes and mountains offer a guide to living? Could you feel let down by a city? Can...

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Advantage Pyongyang

Richard Lloyd Parry, 9 May 2013

The rhetorical torrent which began issuing from the state media in late March was unexpected in its intensity, but none of what followed has been inconsistent with past North Korean behaviour.

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Short Cuts: Snotty American Brat

Christian Lorentzen, 9 May 2013

I was walking down Great Russell Street a few weeks ago when a young man emerged from a house wearing sandals, khaki trousers, a backwards University of Tennessee baseball cap, and a yellow...

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The Magic Lever: How the Banks Do It

Donald MacKenzie, 9 May 2013

Three years ago, the Bank of England set out to calculate a figure that does more than any other to shatter banking’s preferred image of itself.

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Before I went to Cyprus it seemed to me that ordinary people hadn’t done too badly in the rescue of the Cypriot financial system.

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On Thatcher

Karl Miller, 25 April 2013

Margaret Thatcher is the third most written about person in the ‘LRB’ archive, after Shakespeare and Freud. Here Karl Miller’s memories of the paper in her day are accompanied...

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Diary: Berezovsky’s Last Days

Peter Pomerantsev, 25 April 2013

Since his exile from Russia, Berezovsky had been the ultimate bogeyman, hauled out whenever the Kremlin wanted to pin the blame on someone.

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Tell me everything: Facebook Feminism

Joanna Biggs, 11 April 2013

Facebook may have started as a way to rank one woman’s hotness over another’s, but it has been quick to produce its first feminists.

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Margaret Thatcher is the third most written about person in the ‘LRB’ archive, after Shakespeare and Freud. These are some of the things that were said.Servicemen​ are starting to...

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