‘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...
‘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...
Read it here:
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...
‘Working at 𝘎𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦, JFK Jr’s magazine, was never dull, despite the contradictions emanating from the editor-in-chief – and often because of them. Towards the end, though, the sense of impending trouble was strong and unmistakable.’
A Diary from Inigo Thomas.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
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...
‘As so many aspects of our lives have become privatised and reduced to the nuclear family, so has the way people think about their health. But personal choice can only take us so far.’
Edna Bonhomme (@jacobinoire.bsky.social) on measles and vaccines, from the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ju...
‘𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 stands as an astute meditation on repression and madness. Time, however, has dulled the film’s cultural historical implications. The absence of references to the war only makes its agonies, invisibly encoded, more traumatic.’
@malcolmgaskill.bsky.social:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘The Sahara is now one of the most inhospitable places on earth, but not because of the desert. It is a dumping ground in which distant powers and states jettison their problems.’
Rahmane Idrissa on a human history of the Sahara.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
The problems with Britain’s universities are systemic and deep-rooted, not just local or contingent. Yet political and...
www.lrb.co.uk
Among the unvaccinated, one in five people who get measles in the US will be hospitalised; one in twenty children will...
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
