London Review of Books

London Review of Books Europe’s leading magazine of politics, literature, history and ideas, published twice a month. Read and subscribe at lrb.co.uk

The London Review of Books is Europe’s leading magazine of politics, literature, history and ideas, published twice a month.

Issue 47.18 is now online, featuring:Erin Maglaque on Pico della MirandolaConor Gearty on human rights and the lawThomas...
01/10/2025

Issue 47.18 is now online, featuring:

Erin Maglaque on Pico della Mirandola
Conor Gearty on human rights and the law
Thomas Laqueur on the cello
Jessica Olin on Amanda Knox
Colin Burrow on Muriel Spark
and a cover by Naomi Frears.

Also in this issue:

David Runciman on the road to Brexit
James Meek on what AI wants
Neal Ascherson on Asa Briggs
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on Audre Lorde
David Todd on Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Josephine Quinn on Gazan antiquities
Stephen Mulhall on Charles Taylor

Yun Sheng on Chinese youth culture
Patrick Cockburn on the wartime journalist Norman Ebbutt
Michael Wood watches ‘Highest 2 Lowest’
Blake Morrison reads Susan Choi’s ‘Flashlight’
Ben Campbell on Peter Campbell’s photos
and a poem by Maureen N. McLane.

Read now at https://www.lrb.co.uk/

‘Rachel Ruysch’s pyramidal bouquets often require some suspension of disbelief. The vases never seem large enough for th...
30/09/2025

‘Rachel Ruysch’s pyramidal bouquets often require some suspension of disbelief. The vases never seem large enough for the splendid, voluminous arrangements that loom over them. But a balancing act composed of flowers – lightweight, long-stemmed, delicate – is one thing; putting a pineapple in there is another. How would the fruit not topple the whole thing over? What would happen to the fragile-looking butterfly circling the base?

Ruysch was a meticulous observer of nature, an artist whose insects seem real enough to buzz out of their frames. But her most innovative compositions have an unlikely aspect, a touch of the improbability that comes from throwing lilies and cabbage roses together with fruit from halfway around the world.’

Clare Bucknell writes about Rachel Ruysch’s paintings, in the latest issue:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/clare-bucknell/on-rachel-ruysch

Colin Burrow on Muriel Spark’s wickedness, published online early:‘As she put it in her autobiography, drily entitled 𝘊𝘶...
29/09/2025

Colin Burrow on Muriel Spark’s wickedness, published online early:

‘As she put it in her autobiography, drily entitled 𝘊𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘶𝘮 𝘝𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘦 (1992), “most of the memorable experiences of my life I have celebrated, or used for a background in a short story or novel.” Usually she added a twist of irony, and sometimes of revenge, but the characteristic flavour of Muriel Spark’s writing was that of a Catholic ironist, for whom the terrible and the laughable are all but impossible to disentangle, and all might be viewed (or might not be) from the perspective of eternity, over which God might or might not be chuckling. As she put it, “I do so intensely feel the pain of being human that perhaps I am inclined to ‘laugh it off’ in my work too much.”’

Read in full here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n18/colin-burrow/world-beating-buster-upper

At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object,...
27/09/2025

At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state.

In her 1947 book, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the ethical implications of this uncertainty and the ‘agonising evidence of freedom’ it presents, along with the opportunity it creates for continual self-definition. In this Close Readings episode Jonathan Rée and James Wood discuss these arguments and Beauvoir’s warnings against trying to evade the responsibilities imposed upon us by this ambiguity. They also look at the ways in which Beauvoir developed these ideas in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘦𝘹 and her novels, and her remarkable readings of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster.

Listen to an extract from this episode:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/conversations-in-philosophy-the-ethics-of-ambiguity-by-simone-de-beauvoir

Or search for the Close Readings podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe here:
https://lrb.supportingcast.fm/close-readings

‘In creating a myth of modernism, Gertrude Stein did something delirious to the myth the modernists had so far preferred...
26/09/2025

‘In creating a myth of modernism, Gertrude Stein did something delirious to the myth the modernists had so far preferred. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘶𝘵𝘰𝘣𝘪𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘉. 𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘭𝘢𝘴 has become notorious as a compendium of name-dropping, of Picasso and Matisse and everyone else, but it’s in fact far denser with the names of single women: Janet Scudder, Mildred Aldrich, a network of le***an coding. Its major subject is always marriage – an assertion of Stein’s love for Toklas, and Toklas’s love for Stein – as the centre of a new history of literature, whose creator exists because another person loves her.

Maybe I can put it like this. The modernism of Paris in the 1910s, of Picasso and Matisse, liked to argue for pure form, making wilder and wilder gestures towards abstraction. Stein responded in two very different ways. First, she did things with abstraction in words that no one had done before. Later she did things with autobiography that no one had done before. And it may be that the second move, which was by far the more commercial, was also the most original.’

Read Adam Thirlwell’s piece on Gertrude Stein in the latest issue:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/adam-thirlwell/devotion-to-the-cut

‘We should “resolve to make 2025 the year of no snitching”, the American labour journalist Hamilton Nolan wrote in Janua...
24/09/2025

‘We should “resolve to make 2025 the year of no snitching”, the American labour journalist Hamilton Nolan wrote in January. That’s fine with me. I’m an Australian liberal who internalised the belief that dobbing is shameful when I was in primary school. But I can see why MAGA supporters have a different take.

From their perspective, snitching is the pejorative liberal word for the exercise of grassroots democracy needed to keep bureaucrats honest and put phoneys from the ‘woke’ intelligentsia in their place. If it hurts corrupt bureaucrats and phoneys, so much the better: this is payback time. Or, as Stalin would have put it, it’s class war. And if it’s class war, perhaps I should just stick to my own class standpoint, the liberal elite one, and continue to oppose snitching in almost all circumstances.’

In the latest issue, Sheila Fitzpatrick writes about two cultures of denunciation:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/sheila-fitzpatrick/diary

‘While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a morbid symptom of a dying world, his second looks more like an at...
23/09/2025

‘While Trump’s first term looked like an aberration, a morbid symptom of a dying world, his second looks more like an attempt to enforce a new paradigm. The radical policies on trade, migration and international aid, the politicisation of federal spending and the attacks on constitutional process are made possible by the mania of the man at the centre, but they are being pursued according to an ideological agenda.

As liberals struggle to get to grips with this takeover, they are forced to question some of their own presuppositions about regime change, political economy and the role of ideas in public life. To understand the intellectual coordinates of Trumpism requires us to look in less conventional places and to pay more attention to less obvious moments and rhythms. We may also need to reckon with the fact that, more and more, ideas can achieve influence and credibility by circumventing the world of academia altogether.’

Read William Davies on the origins of Trumpism in the latest issue:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/william-davies/repeal-the-20th-century

‘In a scene that could have been taken from 𝘗𝘰𝘱 𝘐𝘥𝘰𝘭, Farage emerged in a cloud of smoke and pyrotechnics. He grinned, m...
21/09/2025

‘In a scene that could have been taken from 𝘗𝘰𝘱 𝘐𝘥𝘰𝘭, Farage emerged in a cloud of smoke and pyrotechnics. He grinned, milking the applause. The speech was pedestrian by his standards but it didn’t need to be electric. The words, now widely reported, wrote themselves. Starmer’s government was “deep in crisis”. Labour MPs would defect to Jeremy Corbyn’s new party. Reform – “the party that stands up for decent working people” – needed to be ready to win a general election in 2027. Before introducing the party’s latest Tory defector, the former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, Farage said he would stop illegal immigrants arriving on small boats within two weeks of winning power. The crowd roared in approval.’

Peter Geoghegan on Reform’s disaster capitalism:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/peter-geoghegan/short-cuts

‘Cotton Nero A.x is a small miracle: a quarto volume, about the size of a paperback, consisting of just 92 leaves. It co...
20/09/2025

‘Cotton Nero A.x is a small miracle: a quarto volume, about the size of a paperback, consisting of just 92 leaves. It contains four untitled English poems – 20th-century editors named them 𝘗𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭, 𝘊𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘗𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 and 𝘗𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 – written in the alliterative style in a dialect of the West Midlands. The first and last of these poems are among the greatest poetic works written in Middle English.

Tom Johnson writes about the mysteries of the Pearl Manuscript, in the latest issue:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/tom-johnson/supereffable

‘For the hospital, and for the NHS, it was a closed case, another preventable death: medicine is imperfect, such things ...
18/09/2025

‘For the hospital, and for the NHS, it was a closed case, another preventable death: medicine is imperfect, such things happen. I couldn’t accept that. Looking back, I was setting the immeasurable private horror of my daughter’s death against its tangible bureaucratic result: a handful of promised hospital improvements and several doctors being asked to “reflect” on their decisions.’

Paul Laity on the preventable death of his daughter Martha:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/paul-laity/after-martha

‘Brian Eno is a conundrum: impish disruptor and happy polymath, he can also be a bit of a tech p**g lecturing us from on...
18/09/2025

‘Brian Eno is a conundrum: impish disruptor and happy polymath, he can also be a bit of a tech p**g lecturing us from on high, dropping serene apothegms that turn out on closer inspection to be vanishingly banal. It’s as if there are two of him: Brian has a great sense of humour, Eno can be suffocatingly precious; Brian picks a brilliant selection of 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘵 𝘐𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘴, Eno nominates for his beach read Richard Rorty’s 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘺, 𝘐𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘺; Brian is all weird eros, Eno makes music that can be oddly clenched or wafty; Brian is inspiringly playful, Eno writes software to systematise (and cage, and kill) that playfulness.’

Ian Penmann on Brian v. Eno, from the new issue:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n17/ian-penman/infinite-wibble

Launching today: James Butler’s () new podcast series ‘On Politics’ goes beyond the headlines and push notifications to ...
17/09/2025

Launching today: James Butler’s () new podcast series ‘On Politics’ goes beyond the headlines and push notifications to get at the real forces transforming our politics here and abroad.

In the first episode, James talks to former Labour MP and minister Chris Mullin, columnist Andy Beckett and journalist Morgan Jones about whether Labour can recover from critical mistakes over tax, why they’re failing to communicate their achievements, and who they should really be trying to represent.

Subsequent episodes will get to grips with the new right; discuss the role of wealth and the City in our political system; find out what MPs really do; and ask what 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 can tell us about extremism.

New episodes will be released on the LRB Podcast every fortnight.

Listen via the link in our bio – and subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you don’t miss an episode.

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