London Review of Books
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‘It is a remarkable fact that “democracy” became the default description for a self-regulating polis community after the classical period, while oligarchy and tyranny were its undesirable opposites.’ Rosalind Thomas on ancient Greek city-states. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Rosalind Thomas · After Chaironeia
Classical Athens was a polis, but so was a tiny Arcadian town such as Orchomenos. In the second century AD, the obscure...
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‘Like a handheld microphone, all of these devices – and I don’t want to go into the mic cover unforgivably known as a “dead cat” – are needed as much for their aptness as a prop as for their omnidirectional sound pickup pattern.’ David Trotter on the microphone. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
David Trotter · A Fly’s Footfall: On the Mic
Any self-respecting 18th-century encyclopedia of the arts and sciences contains an entry along the lines of this one...
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Join us at Great St Barts, London’s oldest parish church, on Monday 5 October for a special screening of Roberto Rossellini’s 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘵 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘴, introduced by the poet and Anglican rector Alice Goodman. Tickets here: www.tickettailor.com/events/londo...
Buy tickets – LRB Screen presents ‘The Flowers of St Francis’ at Great St Barts – St Bartholomew the Great
LRB Screen presents ‘The Flowers of St Francis’ at Great St Barts – St Bartholomew the Great, Mon 5 Oct 2026 - The Flowers of St Francis (Italy, 1950). 87 mins. English subtitles.A special screening o...
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‘In later works, Schoenberg continued to allude to tonality. Even the twelve-note rows of the serial music of the 1920s, in which all notes are declared equal (the emancipation of dissonance, as he put it), sometimes retain tonal associations.’ Laura Tunbridge: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Laura Tunbridge · Air of Another Planet: Schoenberg looks forward
Schoenberg looked backward and forward. In his commitment to perpetuating the Austro-German canon, he drew on the...
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This is extremely, extremely good.
London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 11h ago‘The posture of neutrality is, in practice, highly selective: Sheeran had no problem being “political” when it came to fundraising for Ukraine.’ Lorna Finlayson on Ed Sheeran v. Macklemore, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
This is the master key to deciphering contemporary debates about free speech. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
‘The winter of 1940-41 was one of the coldest of the century. Some Parisians even burned books “whose literary value was considered inferior to their worth as fuel”.’ Daniel Lee on a memoir of wartime Paris. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Daniel Lee · Night and Fog: Women of the Resistance
Etta Shiber’s account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris shows a vivid domestic world seldom seen in comparable memoirs....
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‘It’s hard to miss someone who was hardly there. Violence traps the victim in the present, but no battyboy thinks about the future anyway, “because it might not include us.”’ Adam Mars Jones on Marlon James’s Booker-shortlisted 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘳𝘴. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Adam Mars-Jones · Like Buying a Bag of Mints: On Marlon James
We are left, a third of the way through The Disappearers, with a feeling of absolute outrage, when outrage is no more...
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Richard Lloyd Parry, writing brilliantly in the @lrb.co.uk on the “Kimmification“ of American politics. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Richard Lloyd Parry · Keeping up with the Kims
For the Kims, nuclear weapons have never been an end in themselves; they are an insurance policy against attack by their...
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‘In a rather moving way, each of Anita Brookner’s later novels could be titled “The Following Day”; they are small, sometimes perfect treatises on unfathomable longing and the pressure of imminence.’ Andrew O’Hagan: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Andrew O’Hagan · Omelettes and Whisky: Anita Brookner’s Edge
Over the course of 24 novels and 87 years, Anita Brookner achieved many dislocations of selfhood and may have become...
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‘Wealth matters, too, not just the on-display wealth of the institutions themselves, but the wealth that underwrote the “elegance” of donnish life. The relative decline in academic salaries has eroded such status and style.’ Susan Pedersen on elite universities. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Susan Pedersen · Keep off the grass: Oxbridge Attitudes
Academic life is full of churn. The world changes; younger scholars are seized by new questions and, as they hare down...
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‘The posture of neutrality is, in practice, highly selective: Sheeran had no problem being “political” when it came to fundraising for Ukraine.’ Lorna Finlayson on Ed Sheeran v. Macklemore, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
Lorna Finlayson | Public Positions
Given much of the coverage of the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sheeran had...
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‘Describing herself as having “many feelings about God but with no particular vessel to put them in”, Laurie Colwin was drawn to those “lucky” but quite alien people who had “a fixed course of life, of belief”.’ Kasia Boddy on Colwin’s novels. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Kasia Boddy · Where to Put Your Husband: Laurie Colwin’s Concerns
‘What people eat and how they serve it’ fascinated Colwin, and not only because (as she once noted) she’d learned...
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I had a great time speaking with @will-davies.bsky.social this week, as we tried to answer the question: what’s the point of intellectuals? What’s their - our? - relationship to politics? And why do so many political thinkers find intellectuals a bit… worrying? podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/o...
On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?
Podcast Episode · The LRB Podcast · 23 September · 1hr 7min
podcasts.apple.com
‘Voltaire’s one recorded mention of 𝘛𝘰𝘮 𝘑𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴 is dismissive (“there is nothing of interest, save the character of a barber,” he told Mme du Deffand).’ Thomas Keymer on Voltaire in England. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Thomas Keymer · Mangeons du jésuite: Voltaire in England
‘Almost everything is imitation,’ Voltaire wrote in one of the French editions of Lettres philosophiques. Books were...
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‘Creepiest of all is the uniform laid out like a corpse on Vittorio’s bed. This is what Mussolini was wearing three days before his death. Half a dozen sets of rosary beads were curled like snakes in its folds.’ @danigaravelli.bsky.social on the cult of Mussolini. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Dani Garavelli · Diary: Cult of Mussolini
A couple of days before I arrived in Predappio, I read that Hitler’s birthplace in Austria had been compulsorily...
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‘It is essential to the image of the English as a mild, unobtrusive race that the British Empire should be thought of as a kind of accident.’ Ferdinand Mount on immigration and emigration in the English imagination. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Ferdinand Mount · Modest and Misunderstood: Wretched Strangers
In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It...
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‘Intellectualism is thriving in certain areas of digital culture, but some of the patricians that really wield the most power in digital culture and in the production of content are extremely concerning.’ @will-davies.bsky.social on intellectualism, on the podcast podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?
Podcast Episode · The LRB Podcast · 23 September · 1hr 7min
podcasts.apple.com
‘North Koreans are the only people in the world who never stopped being on a Cold War footing. Far more than their pampered adversaries in the West, more than their Chinese and Russian confrères, they are used to a war economy and the sacrifices it demands.’ www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Richard Lloyd Parry · Keeping up with the Kims
For the Kims, nuclear weapons have never been an end in themselves; they are an insurance policy against attack by their...
lrb.co.uk
Lydia Davis will the give the second annual 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 Autumn Lecture, titled ’Dying, or Doing Something Else: Reflections on Marcus Aurelius and Other Stoics’, on 28 October at the New School, New York City. Details and tickets here: www.tickettailor.com/events/londo...
Book tickets – The 2026 LRB Autumn Lecture in NYC: Lydia Davis on Marcus Aurelius – The Tishman Auditorium at the New School
The 2026 LRB Autumn Lecture in NYC: Lydia Davis on Marcus Aurelius – The Tishman Auditorium at the New School, Wed 28 Oct 2026 - Dying, or Doing Something Else: Reflections on Marcus Aurelius and Othe...
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‘In substituting themselves for a jury and deciding that the fresh evidence would make no difference to the outcome, appellate judges continue to uphold wrongful convictions.’ Matt Foot on problems with the Court of Appeal. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Matt Foot · Short Cuts: Rejected Appeals
The judges might argue that the Court of Appeal is a court of review, whose job is simply to assess whether a conviction...
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‘The culture minister, Miki Zohar, has accused Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham of treason and said they should lose their Israeli citizenship. Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to introduce legislation to enable this.’ Alona Ferber on the response to the documentary 𝘕𝘈𝘡𝘈. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
Alona Ferber | Layers of Denial
The frenzy in Israel surrounding the documentary NAZA is fundamentally undemocratic. That is what happens after years of...
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‘Even the most exclusive concert series required a paying audience to survive. But the notion that in order to understand new music one had to be in the know has persisted, as has the image of the composer as specialist.’ Laura Tunbridge on Schoenberg and his influence www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Laura Tunbridge · Air of Another Planet: Schoenberg looks forward
Schoenberg looked backward and forward. In his commitment to perpetuating the Austro-German canon, he drew on the...
lrb.co.uk
‘To be silent on an issue, or to appeal to “both sides” (as Sheeran did in his teleprompted apology), is itself to take a political stance – and when the issue is genocide, silence or equivocation is complicity.’ Lorna Finlayson on Macklemore v. Sheeran, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
Lorna Finlayson | Public Positions
In much of the coverage of the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, the reality of the incident is turned on its head, as...
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‘Marr played the beginning of “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. “The guitar made me do it,” he said quietly. “I was always looking for the next song.” Andrew O’Hagan on Johnny Marr’s guitars, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
Andrew O’Hagan | Johnny Marr’s Guitars
The Smiths kicked off the Scottish leg of their Meat is Murder tour at the Magnum Leisure Centre in Irvine New Town on...
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‘Shiber and Bonnefous were respectable middle-class women who had no history of challenging the authorities. But confronted with the Vichy regime and the Occupation they felt they had to act.’ Daniel Lee on women of the French resistance. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Daniel Lee · Night and Fog: Women of the Resistance
Etta Shiber’s account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris shows a vivid domestic world seldom seen in comparable memoirs....
lrb.co.uk
“It is Macklemore, not Sheeran, who has been barred from performing. Yet somehow the story is about Sheeran’s freedom to be apolitical.”
Lorna Finlayson | Public Positions
Given much of the coverage of the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sheeran had...
lrb.co.uk
‘Britain’s political class remains unified in its belief that energy infrastructure must be owned by the private sector. Since privatisation in the 1980s, successive leaders have rejected any suggestion of nationalisation.’ @arthurdowning.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Arthur Downing · Asset Sweating: Britain’s Energy Crisis
Britain has private ownership while making the state responsible for planning via subsidies. The result is a zombie...
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What an absolutely brilliant scorching indictment of Sheeran, the BBC, and all the assholes both-siding a genocide www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/se...
Lorna Finlayson | Public Positions
Given much of the coverage of the Ed Sheeran-Macklemore debacle, you could be forgiven for thinking that Sheeran had...
lrb.co.uk
‘Shiber and Bonnefous were respectable middle-class women who had no history of challenging the authorities. But confronted with the Vichy regime and the Occupation they felt they had to act.’ Daniel Lee on women of the French resistance: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Daniel Lee · Night and Fog: Women of the Resistance
There are reasons to value Paris-Underground. Etta Shiber’s account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris shows a vivid...
lrb.co.uk