London Review of Books
@LRB
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Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas, published twice a month.
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Last Seen Profiles
Pinned Tweet
Our new issue, 46.09, is now online, featuring
Julian Barnes on art and memory
@AzadehMoaveni
on sexual violence in the Gaza war
Rosemary Hill
@misspegler
on Barbara Comyns
@malcolmgaskill
on early magic
and a cover by Anne Rothenstein.
Read now at
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‘The only European society that has tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson.’
Pankaj Mishra on Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian expression:
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The front cover of the latest issue of the London Review of Books is strong. I can't download it, but it should be circulated. Yet again the New York Review of Books has fallen way behind, no equivalent of Shatz or Mishra. With NYT floundering its a pity the NYRB is so cautious
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Pankaj Mishra’s new essay ‘The Big Con’ has had an huge impact in India — in fact it’s the second most-read piece on our website so far this year.
350 million Indians went to sleep hungry in 2022, he writes, a number that’s almost doubled in just 4 years:
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‘Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History’, a new documentary by
@antwilks
, is now online.
The film traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, with help from the observations of MI5.
Watch it here now!
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Lucy Prebble: 'Everybody has a Harvey story. Mine is unlurid but revealing.'
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The only writer we’ve ever described as ‘luminous’ was Lucia Berlin, for her short stories.
hey man. heard the lrb called your debut novel “luminous”. hope you’re doing ok
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‘When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.’
Hilary Mantel wrote many wonderful pieces for the LRB and we’d hoped she’d write many more:
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Assange and WikiLeaks did what all journalists should do, which is to make important information available to the public, enabling people to make evidence-based judgments about the actions of their governments.
Patrick Cockburn:
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‘In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan, the head of the Urban League, asked Nina Simone how come she wasn’t “more active in civil rights”. “Motherfucker, I am civil rights,” she replied.’
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
From 2016, John Lahr on Nina Simone, born
#onthisday
:
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In 1983, we published an essay by Oliver Sacks with the title 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat.' Here it is:
http://t.co/vGun28UsSY
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‘Romanticising Palestinians, expecting us to show our strength, resilience and patience throughout it all, imposes mythical terms on our experience and our everyday struggles. It obscures our humanity.’
New on the blog from
@MalakaShwaikh
:
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‘Tigray, which once had one of the best healthcare systems in Ethiopia, now lies in ruins. It is estimated that more than 80 per cent of health facilities across the region have been looted and destroyed.’
@SophieCousins
on the blog:
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‘The liquidation of Gaza, though outlined and broadcast by its perpetrators, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony.’
Pankaj Mishra, in his LRB Winter Lecture of 28 February. Read it here:
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'Women are seen as taking something to which they are not naturally entitled.' Watch the full
@wmarybeard
lecture:
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We’re delighted to announce that the new is now live and – surprise! – we’ve disappeared the paywall. Our archive, containing 17,500 pieces & much more, is available for all to read, without limits, until 15/1. Stand by for suggestions and happy Christmas!
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Ian Hacking, who died yesterday aged 87, wrote 28 pieces for the LRB between 1986 and 2013, on the philosophy of mind, deafness, Iris Murdoch, metaphysics and organ transplants, among other things.
You can read Hacking’s pieces in our online archive here:
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All of John Ashbery's poems for the LRB may be found here:
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Sexual harassment brings mental life to a standstill. It destroys the mind’s capacity for reverie.
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‘There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous.’
Pankaj Mishra on the instrumentalisation of the Shoah:
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This is how the LRB used to be put together.
Watch the full film about The Lost Art of Paste-Up:
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'I get the sense that Jia Tolentino must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women, if she has ever met one'
Lauren Oyler reviews 'Trick Mirror'
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‘Most of the results from Saturday’s presidential and national assembly elections in Nigeria are in … and the general consensus among both Nigerians and the foreign observers is that the voting was rigged.’
@majapearce
for the LRB blog:
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This prerogative act may be open to legal challenge on more than one ground. And the challenges now being brought before the courts in Edinburgh and London could well be of lasting constitutional significance.
A new essay by Stephen Sedley:
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‘Marxism is about leisure, not labour.’
Read Terry Eagleton’s 2024 Winter Lecture, online now:
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Our new issue is now online. For the first time in the LRB's history, it contains just one piece (alongside the usual columns): Andrew O’Hagan’s investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire and its political aftermath.
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Watch Pankaj Mishra's talk in full on YouTube:
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‘The German government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil.’
– President Hage Geingob, 13 January.
Online early:
@weizman_eyal
reports from Namibia on Nama and Ovaherero calls for not just recognition but reparations.
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‘We call on our governments to demand an immediate ceasefire and the unimpeded admission of humanitarian aid into Gaza.’
An open letter on the situation in Palestine, signed by 600 writers and artists.
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‘Bombs manufactured in Texas are fitted with precision-guidance systems from Missouri, shipped to Europe, then flown, perhaps via British bases in Cyprus, to Israel before being dropped on Gaza.’
@tomfstevenson
on ‘transnational’ elements in the Gaza war
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‘When and where does our condemnation begin and end?’
Judith Butler on violence, new online now:
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Jenny Diski’s 150 articles (and 65 blogs) for the LRB are all now freely available to read online:
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‘He was telling jokes about Bertrand Russell at a time when the undergraduate audience scarcely knew who Russell was, so it is no surprise to read here that he consorted with his fellow Footlights only when performing.’ Clive James on Jonathan Miller:
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‘Today, Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including some historians, consider Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.’
Eric Foner on Abraham Lincoln, John Brown and abolition:
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As it happens, we’re publishing an essay on Nero in our next issue.
Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!
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Should you need an approximately literary joke to accompany Christmas dinner – a letter to the editor from December 2010:
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‘Lenin liked London primarily because he had fallen in love. The object of his love was the British Museum – or rather, the great circular reading room of the library.’
Sheila Fitzpatrick on Lenin in London:
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‘When I arrived, I found a letter from Sartre and Beauvoir waiting for me at the hotel. “For security reasons,” the message ran, “the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.”’
Read Edward Said's encounter with Sartre in the archive:
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𝘋𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘴 is an autobiographical comic by Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton about the two years she spent working in the Alberta oil sands to pay off her student debts.
It cost her more than she anticipated, as Sarah Resnick shows:
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ELECTION NIGHT TWITTER TAKEOVER!
Tomorrow evening, between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. (GMT), we’ll be handing over the keys to our Twitter account to a star-studded line-up of friends. Here’s who’ll be on when: tweets their own and won’t reflect the LRB &c. &c. See you here, then!
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‘Modi has counted on sympathetic journalists and financial speculators in the West to cast a seductive veil over his version of political economy, environmental activism and history.’
New, from Pankaj Mishra: The Big Con
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‘His appearances on TV had an immeasurable impact on the lives of post-migrant kids growing up in the 1970s who didn't want to be athletes or singers or dancers. He really did seem to say a life of the mind was a possibility.’
@neepmail
on Stuart Hall:
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Tom Verlaine’s 50,000 books are a ‘reminder of different days in a different city’, Alex Abramovich writes, ‘where the bookstores and record stores stayed open late, and you could poke around in them even after a night out at CBGB . . .
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What, in the end, is she actually saying? But surely she has told us that herself, and all along. What she is saying, standing in the corner of every piece, holding her yellow legal pad and watching, is: ‘I was there.’
@TriciaLockwood
on Joan Didion:
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@EmilyRCWilson
@edithmayhall
@TobiasMenzies
We're pleased to be able to share it! The video’s ad-free on our website here:
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Anyone who claims that Labour’s leftward shift was the product of a cultish devotion to one man, and will disappear on his departure, doesn’t understand its origins or its implications.
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While most of the children born to white fathers and black mothers in 18th-century Jamaica remained in slavery, thousands of boys and girls were sent to England and Scotland. What happened to them?
Catherine Hall on 'persons outside the law':
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‘The mantra on everyone’s lips is a blunt statement of Krugman’s position. Do not repeat the mistakes of the early Obama administration. Go large.’
@adam_tooze
on Paul Krugman:
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‘It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous.’
Pankaj Mishra:
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‘A necessary consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on its memory.’
Pankaj Mishra’s 28 February Winter Lecture, ‘The Shoah after Gaza’, is online now:
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Always asking the important questions.
Read here:
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White supremacy and fascism did not start with Trump and it won’t end even if this election ends him. Police violence is not an anomaly or series of isolated incidents. It’s part of a maintained system of racialized state violence and repression. It’s as old as the US itself.
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‘The palace is being furnished at colossal expense; after perusing Italian luxury furniture catalogues, Navalny’s team established the cost of many individual items, the choicest being a gold-plated toilet brush that apparently costs €700.’
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Ahdaf Soueif on why she's resigned from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees:
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We’re delighted to announce that MANTEL PIECES: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing from the ‘London Review of Books’, by Hilary Mantel, will be published by
@4thEstateBooks
and the LRB on 1 October 2020.
Details of how to pre-order your copy from the
@LRBbookshop
to follow.
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Gaza poet Refaat Alareer and
@ProfARichardson
were working together on a project digitising Thomas Hardy’s letters.
‘The last time I heard from him he had been discussing 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘹𝘦𝘯 with his students. He was killed in an airstrike on 7 December.’
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With her new translation of the Iliad, ten years in the making,
@EmilyRCWilson
gives us a complete Homer for a new generation.
On 2 October she came to Conway Hall to discuss her work, and Juliet Stevenson and
@TobiasMenzies
read passages.
Watch here:
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Been weighing up whether to retweet this all afternoon, decided it's probably worth it in order to re-up:
Can't wait to read Trump's funny, devastating, but ultimately life-affirming essay about surviving COVID-19 in the London Review of Books.
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'Virtually everything that nationalists say about the past is wrong.'
– Eric Hobsbawm, in a new film about his life and work, from
@antwilks
Watch it here now!
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‘I was tempted to record the cause of death as “weak health system for poor people”, “uninsured”, “fell through gaping hole in safety net” or “too poor to survive catastrophic illness” … these were “stupid deaths”.’
Paul Farmer, 1959-2022, in the LRB:
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‘I think of what has come to my city as “the great withdrawal”. People on the street often seem to have their eyes elsewhere, usually on their phones: they might video a crime, but they might also not notice it’s happening.’
New, by
@RebeccaSolnit
:
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‘Kraftwerk seemed to be aiming at a kind of electronic Esperanto, an imaginary universal language that anyone could learn, anyone could speak, anyone could dance to.’
@owenhatherley
on the late Florian Schneider
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‘What I really love to read about, and to write about, are experiences that are, in fact, completely banal but that don’t necessarily conform to our narratives about what normality is.’
Watch all of Sally Rooney’s
@LRBbookshop
event on
#NormalPeople
here:
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We've removed the paywall for Perry Anderson's essay on Brazil:
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a passionate presence on Twitter, author of two crucial books--"The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America" & "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump & the Erosion of America."
Sarah Kendzior, our Cassandra, now vindicated.
#BestResistanceTwitterer2016
-2020
Sarah Kendzior "our Cassandra"--one of the most eloquent, informative, crucial observers of the T***p phenomenon: the election of, strengthening of, enabling of autocracy shaping before our eyes.
unfortunately, like Cassandra, Sarah was unheeded.
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‘The memory of the Shoah did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945; it was constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends.’
Watch Pankaj Mishra's LRB Winter Lecture in full on YouTube:
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‘Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.’
We’ve brought Alan Bennett’s story ‘The Uncommon Reader’, first published in the LRB in 2007, in front of the paywall for the next few days:
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'Among the great ecological disasters of the 21st century is the fact that the assassin who stabbed Bolsonaro in the chest during his 2018 presidential campaign did not succeed in killing the man'
Benjamin Kunkel on the fires in Brazil
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‘If David wants to get his daughter in he should obviously start giving money.’
@DebFriedell
on what WikiLeaks revealed about Ivy League admissions
#LRBarchive
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How ever this ends, things that arent happening in 2020:
A Blue Wave-Biden victory
Comprehensive electoral revulsion against Trump Presidency
Dem victories fated by demography for foreseeable future.
A convulsive liberation from “Trump nightmare”.
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‘I am glad not to be a Greenland shark; I don’t have enough thoughts to fill five hundred years. But I find the very idea of them hopeful. They will see us pass through our current spinning apocalypse.’
Katherine Rundell considers the Greenland shark:
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Announcement: Mary-Kay Wilmers is stepping down as editor of the London Review of Books. She will continue to be closely involved with the paper as consulting editor. Jean McNicol and Alice Spawls have been appointed to succeed Wilmers as editors.
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Terry Eagleton: Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with American TV evangelists.
http://t.co/m6i41k3Nw6
#lrbarchives
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A letter from December 2010, presented without comment.
P.S. subscribe for more great jokes thanks:
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‘It wasn’t until the 1930s, when Alan Turing drew attention to the originality of her work, that Ada got her due, up to a point.’ Read Rosemary Hill on the mathematician Ada Lovelace
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'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology'
Terry Eagleton on 'The God Delusion'
#LRBarchive
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‘Not many living poets become streets. Nor should they. Ferlinghetti was so honoured ... He pointed out that his alley had been a hangout for bootleggers and undertakers. And that he felt right at home.’
Iain Sinclair on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021:
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When Princess Margaret made a guest appearance in an episode of The Archers, the producer said: ‘That’s very good, ma’am, but do you think you could sound as if you were enjoying yourself a little more?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t be, would I?’ she replied.
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‘The liquidation of Gaza, though outlined and broadcast by its perpetrators, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony.’
Pankaj Mishra’s LRB Winter Lecture is now online to read and watch:
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The problem for US Democrats, and more generally for social democrats around the globe, is that at a time of rapid and alarming change they don’t have as sharp a vision of the future as the people who want to go back to an imagined past.
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'We read, really,’ Naipaul once wrote, ‘to find out what we already know.’
Frank Kermode, James Wood & other LRB writers on the novels of V.S. Naipaul:
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In revealing everything he did, including his own identity, to the probable detriment of his health, wealth and sanity, Snowden was also violating his own privacy. 'Permanent Record' takes that self-violation as far as it can go.
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‘I passed from the brilliance of 𝘎𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘭 to 𝘕𝘢𝘯𝘢, which is the favourite of some friends of mine. Oh good, I thought, now it’s all the masterpieces in a row.
Wrong.’
@blgtylr
on his two years with Zola, online early:
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‘We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time.’
Pankaj Mishra's Winter Lecture:
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‘See you in hell, punk.’
Thomas Jones (
@moonjets
) reviewing Kathryn Tempest’s biography of Brutus in 2018
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‘All around us are the spiralling wealth of financial elites, the dilapidated public realm, unaffordable housing and continued investment in technologies that harm us. Attributing all of this to “the market” prolongs the failure to understand it.’
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In 1916, Harrods sold gift-wrapped packets of morphine as ‘useful and attractive presents'
#LRBarchive
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New!
@conorgearty
on Israel’s three modes of denial as to its actions in Gaza:
‘literal denial (it never happened); interpretative denial (it’s not what you think it is) and implicatory denial (we have to do it/it’s terrible, but it’s not our fault).’
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The left has nothing to gain from ‘taking immigration seriously’: as soon as you put immigration at the top of your list of problems to be dealt with, you’ve accepted the far-right’s terms of debate, which means they’ve already won.
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‘Words can change the world. This is a truth that conservatives, who love to make fun of linguistic innovators as if they were divorced from reality, privately recognise and fear.’
@amiasrinivasan
on pronouns:
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‘For Hegel, you don’t need to tack some arbitrary utopian dimension onto what exists, since what exists already secretes within itself the seeds of what ought to be.’
Terry Eagleton on the ‘obscurantist, semi-mystical’ Hegel:
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