London Review of Books

‘Ireland 1972’ by Josef Koudelka

The statistics​ for the decline in people working on the land in Europe are stark. In Remembering Peasants, Patrick Joyce reports that in 1950 nearly half the population of Spain were agricultural workers. By 1980 the figure was 14.5 per cent; by 2020 it was less than 5 per cent. In France the proportion of people working in agriculture was...

The psychoanalyst​ Marion Milner was born with the 20th century. She was the youngest child of a middling-posh family: meadow at the bottom of the Surrey garden, nannies, ponies, boarding school, a stint training as a Montessori teacher and in 1924 the award of a first-class degree in psychology from University College London. She was 26 in December 1926 when, feeling obscurely dissatisfied...

Angela Merkel​ was 35 when the country in which she had established herself as a research scientist ceased to exist. Once that happened, the transition was instantaneous: her career in science ended and her career in politics began. For nearly half of the period that has elapsed since that moment in 1990 – 16 out of 34 years – Merkel was at the apex of the German state. She...

Iwas​ on the ferry to Islay in November 2018 when I got a message telling me that a 16-year-old boy had killed himself in Polmont Young Offender Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie Allan. I was working on a story about...

It often feels​ as though New Left Review has been around for as long as the King James Bible. It addresses its readers without condescension in a time-honoured idiom. Occasionally its writers serve up daunting preambles to their pieces. Here is Dylan Riley in 2018 explaining why it’s misleading to think of Trump as a fascist: ‘The classical fascisms that took shape in Italy and...

On​ 30 September 2001, Tariq Ali was arrested at Munich airport. His hand luggage contained two objects which were regarded as suspicious: a book by Karl Marx and a copy of the Times Literary Supplement, which included a review, annotated by Ali, of a volume about Algeria. These items were confiscated and he was taken to the airport’s police headquarters. ‘You can’t travel...

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20 February 2025

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Indonesia​ rarely makes the headlines. It is the least understood of the world’s most populous countries and the largest majority Muslim country, its population of 280 million exceeded only by those of the US, India and China; it is the world’s fourteenth largest country by area and its economy is the fifth largest in Asia. It has been known to Europeans since 1512 and gained...

In March​ 1945, the classical music world in Paris split into warring camps after the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s two-hour devotional suite for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. The performer was Yvonne Loriod, a young pianist who would later become Messiaen’s wife. Reciting texts infused with Catholic mysticism after each movement, Messiaen struck the...

Fridges​ are boxes in which we put food and forget about it. That is both their wonder and their defect. The Italian sociologist Girolamo Sineri claimed that the act of preserving food is ‘anxiety in its purest form’. The domestic refrigerator allows us to shed much of that anxiety or to transform it into the guilt that comes from scraping yet another bag of slimy, uneaten...

Human history​, at least of the settled and sedentary, begins with the occupation of land. Animals are kept out or enclosed with fences. Plants and trees are cut back, dug up, selectively cultivated. Non-human occupants, spirits and resident deities are assuaged or tamed through ritual and consecration. In Latin, the words meaning to settle, to worship and to work the land all derive from...

Edward​ III liked to dress up as a bird. In 1348, at a tournament in Bury St Edmunds, he revealed himself as a gleaming pheasant with copper-pipe wings and real feathers. The next year, celebrating Christmas with the archbishop of Canterbury, he wore a white buckram harness spangled with three hundred leaves of silver, adorned with one of his mottoes: ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/by godes...

In the retrospective​ currently on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Mies van der Rohe’s glass cube in Berlin, six of Nan Goldin’s works are displayed inside large black felt-lined structures. Each has a different kind of entrance: one made of sumptuous velvet, another a cold blue corridor. Inside are slideshows made up of photographs taken across fifty years. Goldin’s...

On​ the morning of 18 April 2023, the chess grandmaster Ding Liren, the highest-rated Chinese player of all time, was discussing tactics with his coach. He was due to play game 7 of his world championship match against Ian Nepomniachtchi (known to chess fans as Nepo) that afternoon. They were tied 3-3; the first player to seven and a half points would inherit the crown that had been...

The compound word​ kolossourgia, ‘monumental composition’, is found only once in extant ancient Greek, in a ringing sentence composed by Strabo of Amaseia. He uses it to convey the scope and technique of his Geographica, an atlas in written form describing all the lands known to the Greeks and Romans of his day. In a passage introducing the work, Strabo invokes the analogy of...

For British music​, 1978 was a year of hesitation. Pop began to admit that it didn’t know what to do with itself as punk evolved into New Wave, which was suddenly on Top of the Pops most weeks. Those who had been shocked by punk now just found it annoying. The bands that were still together had learned how to put on a show. They were slicker and more predictable, and we went to see...

Podcast

The Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth is a master of the collapsing relationship. In her twenty books, five of which have been translated into English, she turns her eye to estranged siblings, tormented lovers, demanding parents and disaffected colleagues with the same combination of philosophical penetration and sympathy. But she hasn’t always received the recognition afforded to her...

Podcast

Podcast

Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. His presidency left the United States a far more unequal place at home, with a renewed commitment to deadly imperial adventures abroad. Yet he had a gift for making up stories that ‘made America feel good...

Podcast

In the month since Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by a coalition of rebel forces, thousands of political prisoners have been released while many more remain missing, assumed lost to the regime. The most powerful group among the rebels, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has moved to take control of the country while Israel has seized the opportunity to carry out extensive bombing of...

Podcast

‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink.’ By the late 1990s, Abba ‘were basically tap water’. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Chal joins Thomas Jones to discuss...

Podcast

Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhere. He has also written more than a hundred pieces for the London Review of Books, from its seventh issue (in February 1980) to its most recent. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on...

Podcast

Video

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...