Contents · Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.| London Review of Books
Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than of ‘ferreting’, which was also the word he used to describe ‘Joyce’s habit of ferreting out details’. Joyce, he wrote in an early essay, ‘revelled in the very clutter of experience that Yeats constantly simplified and stylised’.| London Review of Books
In this country, trial by jury is constitutive of a fair, credible, legitimate system of criminal justice. It is what gives legitimacy to the state’s extensive powers of coercion over wrongdoers. At some point in public consciousness, the constitutive merges with the constitutional, even if lawyers don’t see it that way.| London Review of Books
While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Parker is more astute than most on matters of style, the literary quality for which repetition is both most necessary and most risky. Doing certain things over and over is what makes a style distinctive, but it also leaves a writer vulnerable to parody, or self-parody.| London Review of Books
For years, his biography on press releases was just four words long: ‘Eagle scout, Missoula, Montana.’ David Lynch wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive.| London Review of Books
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real. Dream of the...| London Review of Books
The manosphere is confusing, because it’s a place where one can find both benign advice about protein consumption and ideas that have led to mass shootings. Its theories of evolutionary biology, mostly concerning what women were ‘built’ to do, are reposted on social media by people such as Elon Musk. It’s annoying to have to take it seriously, just as it’s annoying to have to take the Taliban’s gender theories seriously.| London Review of Books
Payne Knight’s greatest desire was that the British Museum would provide the public free access to an unrivalled resource for the study of antiquity and of art. His collection was, first and foremost, a scholarly one, which, in his own words, would serve ‘to gratify taste and curiosity – to please and to instruct’.| London Review of Books
Giving the US access to El Salvador’s expanded prison system as an offshore gulag has made Nayib Bukele a darling of the American right. They praise him as a visionary leader, but his appeal lies in something more primordial: the assertion that a broken country can be fixed with sufficient state violence.| London Review of Books
It’s hard to articulate what Nicola Sturgeon’s feminism meant to someone like me who moved back to Scotland in the mid-1990s, a country stifled by all-male clubs and all-male panels, with its politics and journalism dominated by ‘big beasts’, pretty much all of them men. Sturgeon was always willing to address what it meant to be a woman in power.| London Review of Books
Dream Count is a product of Adichie’s more ambivalent African feminism. The novel is written entirely from the perspective of women, but their primary interest appears to be their relationships with men. Their desires are not all romantic or sexual, but they all betray a conflict between the women’s attempts to live on their own terms and the relationships that impede them.| London Review of Books
Any form of ‘just transition’ – managing the move to a greener economy while also protecting workers and communities such as Grangemouth – seems implausible in the context of spiralling energy costs, failed climate targets and mounting closures in older manufacturing sectors without compensatory growth in newer industries. Grangemouth is only one entry in a growing list.| London Review of Books
‘Shamanism’, as a concept, is of course a Western invention, and from the earliest cross-cultural encounters it was defined in opposition to Western norms as demonic, primitive or irrational. The first published account, from the Dutch explorer Nicolaas Witsen’s trip to Siberia in the 1660s, included a woodcut of a shaman in animal furs and antlers, dancing and beating a drum, titled ‘Tungus Shaman, or Priest of the Devil’.| London Review of Books
It’s not just that the past only grudgingly yields its secrets, but that their significance is often obscure until more details emerge. Starting out on his quest into his family history, Joe Dunthorne doesn’t know what to ask his grandmother about the experience of Jewish families such as theirs in Hitler’s Germany. She tells him to go and read a book. He does, but it turns out she didn’t like that book. So he decides to write one instead.| London Review of Books
One of the signatures of classic film comedy is a kind of crazy grace amid peril, a performance of control where there seems to be none. There is a reverse tradition, but it doesn’t produce classics, only extended parodies of bad luck. We laugh quite a bit but soon stop to wonder what we were laughing at. Farce has begun to look like a morbid destiny.| London Review of Books
In Hitler’s mind, eugenics was part of Germany’s long-term preparation for victory in the struggle between races. The effects of Nazi eugenic policies would not be immediate, but no matter: he was planning the ‘thousand-year Reich’. Medical opinion in Germany was overwhelmingly in support of what doctors deemed to be a scientifically informed policy aimed at improving the quality of the population.| London Review of Books
Linton Kwesi Johnson has maintained that ‘writing poetry or making music ... is not a substitute for hardcore political activism.’ But his poetry was intertwined with that activism: he drew inspiration from the anti-racist movement and chronicled it; he absorbed its language and also provided many of its most memorable lines.| London Review of Books
The intensity of locating something so small and quick requires both force and passivity. Many birders spend long days in nature looking for an example of a particular species, and then, on finding it, do nothing. They just jot something down, or maybe take a photograph. This makes their fervour, the ‘nakedness of their seeking’ and ‘so-public twitching hunger’, as Jonathan Franzen, a birder himself, has put it, mysterious and, to me, somewhat off-putting.| London Review of Books
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 16 (Friday 29 August 2025)| London Review of Books
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.| London Review of Books
From the late Middle Ages all the way to Pasolini’s 1971 film, Boccaccio has been best remembered – understandably...| London Review of Books
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.| London Review of Books
Europe’s leading magazine of ideas, published twice a month. Book reviews and essays (and much more online) renowned for their fearlessness, range and elegance.| London Review of Books
In the West Papuan regency of Merauke, close to the border with Papua New Guinea, Indonesia is rapidly clearing land in...| LRB Blog
I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from...| London Review of Books
In aerospace, engineering, technology, construction, health and defence, the rush is on to grab as many fat contracts as...| London Review of Books
On entering their cell for the first time, the recludensus (novice recluse) would climb into a grave dug inside the cell...| London Review of Books
The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed...| London Review of Books
Deepseek was set up as a research initiative unconstrained by commercial imperatives, with the aim of achieving...| London Review of Books
When diversity, equity and inclusion become ‘threats’ to the order of society, progressive politics in general is...| London Review of Books
Where amid this turmoil does neoliberalism stand? In emergency conditions it has been forced to take measures –...| London Review of Books
Philosophers may talk about justice or rights, but they don’t often try to reshape the world according to their ideals...| London Review of Books
Gisèle Pelicot doesn’t conceive of her now ex-husband or the other men who raped her as ‘bad apples’, aberrations...| London Review of Books
The political question of moment is why, rather than fundamentally altering the Western view of Israel, the events of...| London Review of Books
My first action on waking is to look at my phone. Press the green WhatsApp icon and hope for two blue ticks. One grey...| LRB Blog
I’m angry. I’m so angry it woke me up this morning. And I’m angry about being angry because I can’t channel the...| LRB Blog
‘I can start with saying it is an unbearable situation in terms of dignity,’ my friend Marwa says in one of the...| LRB Blog
Europe’s leading magazine of ideas, published twice a month. Book reviews and essays (and much more online) renowned for their fearlessness, range and elegance.| LRB Blog
No one should be moved off land as a result of a capitalist onslaught aligned with a settler state, whether they have...| London Review of Books
On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main...| LRB Blog
The next legislative elections in Estonia will be in 2027, and it would be a stretch to gauge the future balance of...| LRB Blog
Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike...| London Review of Books
At the turn of the 20th century, the Swiss were plagued by strange, interlinked medical conditions, which existed...| London Review of Books
We are to condemn or approve, and that makes sense, but is that all that is ethically required of us? In fact, I do...| London Review of Books
The inescapable truth is that Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance by violence, any more than the...| London Review of Books
We, the undersigned artists and writers based in the EU, the UK and North America, call on our governments to demand an...| LRB Blog
