Claire Wilmot | Fascistic Dream Machines
Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather...| LRB Blog
Part of the misunderstanding of the deepfake threat stems from the idea that it is a problem of bad information, rather...| LRB Blog
From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They were all mistaken.| London Review of Books
A passive-aggressive ‘lying flat’ attitude is easily dismissed as laziness, but Gen Z-ers have developed a philosophy to counter the accusation. Praising idleness sounds last century; instead, they like to invoke Marx: while capitalists would rather throw away their goods than give them to workers, we workers would rather be idle than give our labour to capitalists.| London Review of Books
The Supreme Court is quietly editing the Human Rights Act out of existence. None of this is being done in secret – the judgments are public – but the changes have barely registered. Judges, whether serving or retired, tend not to speak out. Barristers know on which side their bread is buttered.| London Review of Books
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral success of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. But to the extent that La France insoumise looks to foreign models, it usually invokes the Five Star Movement in Italy, for its canny use of new media, or Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, for their radical hostility to neoliberal capitalism.| London Review of Books
Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?| London Review of Books
The snapshots in my father’s book were taken during his first three years in London, after he emigrated from New Zealand with my mother. The picture shown here was taken at a Stepney street market. I wonder whether this was one of the photographs he had in mind when, some years later, in a review for the Listener, he wrote: ‘When a glum, derisive, sulky or tired face looks out at you, remember it is the photographer he is seeing – not you.’| London Review of Books
For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember that existing iterations of AI can’t care. The chatbot doesn’t not care like a human not caring: it doesn’t care like a rock doesn’t care, or a glass of water. AI doesn’t want anything. But this is bound to change.| London Review of Books
New linguistic articulations can reconfigure the way we make sense of our own feelings, thoughts and responses – our internalised self-interpretations. And what is true of our most basic feelings and emotions also applies to more complex aspects of self-interpretation: our conception of our individual character, of what a good life for us might be, even of what it is to be human.| London Review of Books
This show has excited controversy: should we even be talking about damage to antiquities in the context of so much killing? The show’s maps dating from earlier this year, however, make it clear that targeting the history and heritage of the Palestinian people has been an intrinsic aspect of the Israeli assault on Gaza.| London Review of Books
Cellists and violinists in particular are haunted by the musicians who played their instruments before them and those who had taught these ancestors. Even new instruments bear the marks not only of their maker but of the history of the wood of which they are made. But there is a tension in the way we understand and hear – or don’t hear – these histories.| London Review of Books
The characteristic flavour of 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.| London Review of Books
A proud sci-fi and fantasy nerd, Amanda Knox inhabits the multiverse. She ‘fantasises about moving to a remote village in Germany and becoming a seamstress’; ‘If all else fails,’ she jokes, ‘I can make cuckoo clocks for a living.’ Elsewhere she seriously considers ‘alternative realities’. She returns again and again to the night of Meredith Kercher’s murder: ‘What happened to her could so easily have happened to me.’| London Review of Books
Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which is a loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s novel King’s Ransom (1959). But Spike Lee turns it into a genuine scamper, where the scampering becomes the point. This is one of the recurring pleasures of his films. He likes to mix genres and return to places and people.| London Review of Books
Asa Briggs used sweeping educational change to increase equality in England. He helped to make history, as well as writing it. Today, as universities falter and plutocratic inequality towers over Asa’s England, will anyone draw a new Map of Learning?| London Review of Books
morning mist and cloudfaint on the mountaina god is moving his faceover the waters a godin the cleft in the pass up theghyll the scramblers maketheir way also up –yesterday ...| London Review of Books
Lorde never had to persuade her comrades about a strategy, tactic or new idea, lose an argument in order to maintain a relationship or undergo any of the tricky experiences that make politics the complicated business that it is. Her poetry and essays offer something else: a reflection of that work, an analysis of its tensions and a language for its losses and aspirations.| London Review of Books
It can’t have been hard for Susan Choi to hit on the title of her novel, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Flashlights show the way; they expose dark corners; in the right hands they’re a servant of truth, in the wrong hands a tool of oppression. Flashlight has a question to ask: did the drowned man really drown? The answer isn’t easy to find.| London Review of Books
In August 1937, three German journalists were expelled from Britain for suspected espionage. Retaliation was a legitimate reason to get rid of Norman Ebbutt, and he was served his expulsion order by the German police. He left Berlin for the last time on the evening of 21 August, seen off from Charlottenburg station by fifty foreign correspondents. The impact Ebbutt had had became clear soon after his departure.| London Review of Books
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 18 (Friday 26 September 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
The strange pleasure of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down...| London Review of Books
Resistance is at once recognition and a fantasy of catastrophe; indeed, in resisting one has always leaped forward to...| London Review of Books
To think about Stevens’s life, or Stevens from the perspective of his life, is to be told that your bird of paradise...| London Review of Books
Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than...| 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
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
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
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
