Critical thinking, published every fortnight.
Read at lrb.co.uk
Try the LRB for six months for just £12: lrb.me/social
London Review of Books
Loading...
‘“It's not work. You don't sweat. / Nobody pays for it.”
Nobody does pay for poetry, actually.
Nobody does pay for it. Do we sweat? That's a good question.’
Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar on work in our new series ‘Poetry and the Turning World’, on the podcast.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
Luqman Saeed in Belfast: we are under some kind of house arrest. Members of ethnic minority are asking white friends to accompany them to reduce risks of attacks.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
‘Benjamin Myers’s characters dug and they worked the land and they fought and they snared rabbits, and they were rendered in prose that aspired to the sparse behaviourism of Cormac McCarthy. You could call this constellation of interests “masculinity”.’
Jon Day:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘However briefly and superficially, the city’s infinitely fissiparous social, political and cultural spheres have, for now, cohered – millions watching together, cheering for an end to the Knicks’ half-century of humiliation.’
Arvin Alaigh on the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
‘This is not our first summer of racially motivated unrest, but the level of fear this time is unprecedented. Videos circulating on social media appear to show masked individuals stopping cars to identify people from immigrant backgrounds.’
Luqman Saeed in Belfast.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
London Review of Books
London Review of Books
elia ayoub
London Review of Books
London Review of Books
‘There are Horrockses horrors designed to make anyone of five foot four look like a parcel as well as a Wedgwood-inspired outfit from Angela Kelly which turns the monarch into a tea set.’
Susannah Clapp on the late Queen’s frocks, at the King’s Gallery.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Earlier Mrs Wren had appeared entirely joyful holding her husband’s hand in the outer corridor – yet how she wept inside of the courtroom, so much so that her face looked enamelled.
And this could all prove that Mr Wren is an admirable man.
A story by Diane Williams:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘His conception of socialism was evolutionary rather than revolutionary; for him, socialism was an extension of radical Liberalism rather than its negation, and could only be secured by parliamentary means.’
Malcolm Petrie on what Ramsay MacDonald got wrong.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Higher education cannot function like a genuine market, where consumers can try out one brand of soap powder this month and another next month.’
Stefan Collini on what went wrong in UK higher education.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘A sort of Jewish 𝘉𝘶𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴, though 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘴 doesn’t have the purpose, the control or the independence of Thomas Mann’s novel; rather, it sits, like a sort of flywheel or epiphenomenon, on history.’
Michael Hofmann on Gabriele Tergit’s Berlin saga.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
London Review of Books
Gabriele Tergit’s The Effingers is a remarkable way of rendering history. That said, stasis, being, durée,...