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On the podcast: is writing a poem work? In the first of a new series, ‘Poetry and the Turning World’, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider the concepts of work and play in the writing process, and explore three poems that address workplace experiences.
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
‘Perhaps Duchamp was aware of his own limitations, or maybe he realised that his true interests lay elsewhere, not in “retinal” painting (as he put it dismissively) but in cerebral art: he was primarily an ideas man.’
Hal Foster on the Marcel Duchamp retrospective.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Agnès Varda launched her revolt against femininity early. When she was ten, her mother took her to see 𝘚𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘞𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘋𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘧𝘴 at the Métropole cinema in Brussels. Varda hated it: “Why does she take care of these little ones all the time?”’
Lili Owen Rowlands:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘The UK ranks last among G7 countries in MMR coverage: in 2024, only 89 per cent of children received their first MMR jab. The figure for Germany is 96 per cent; in France, Italy and Japan it’s 95 per cent; in the US, 92 per cent.’
Edna Bonhomme on measles and vaccines
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
‘Most things lose their distinctive qualities when they get turned into a number. What they gain is a measure of interchangeability. This works well for organisations that are interested in economies of scale. It works badly for anyone who wants to do their own thing.’
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘The mantra, repeated ad nauseam in those years, was “competition drives up quality,” an assertion that anyone looking at, say, the privatised water companies or privatised train companies might greet with a hollow laugh.’
Stefan Collini on the crisis in universities.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Read it here:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘There’s distance between Andy Burnham and the things that make people most angry, or despairing, about Starmer: his response to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza, his dalliance with Peter Mandelson.’
@jamesmeek.bsky.social on Burnham’s vision.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘The fashion for dismembering illuminated manuscripts was rampant around the turn of the 20th century and hard to circumvent. Otto Ege, for example, a bookseller and lecturer, cut out pages from around fifty manuscripts to sell in newly compiled portfolios.’
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘷𝘦, of course, is a bittersweet elegy – for the old Western way of life, for the era of American expansion, for the cowboy. It’s also, perhaps too subtly, a critique of those things.’
@jrobertlennon.com revisits Larry McMurtry.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Podcast Episode · The LRB Podcast · 10 June · 1hr 5min
McMurtry bemoans the fact that readers take his characters at face value and misidentify cowboy selfishness as heroism...
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London Review of Books
I’ve written in the @lrb.co.uk about James Bryce, very carefully brought to life by @stuartjones.bsky.social. Bryce managed to balance academia and politics better than anyone could today. His thirst for prizes seems endearingly quaint, but the decline of the cursus honorum has had its downsides
