Gurle Talk

Mary Wellesley

When​ my daughter began to talk about her body and the bodies of others, I wondered what word we should use for female genitals. I had been taught the term ‘front-bottom’ as a child. Very little needs to be said here about how stupid this is. My husband and I opted instead for ‘vulva’. It’s functional, but it does sound strange in certain contexts. My daughter...

 

Remembering the Future

Hazel V. Carby

Aband​ of light, reflected across the waters of Morgan Lake, New Mexico, leads our eyes from the centre foreground to a power plant on the Navajo Reservation: the Four Corners Power Plant, one of the largest coal-fired generating stations in the United States. In this photograph by the Diné artist Will Wilson, the plant is entirely in shadow, as dark as the bituminous coal that fuels...

 

Capitalism Decarbonised

William Davies

Thewords ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by...

The Belgrano Diary

The sinking of the General Belgrano was the bloodiest and most controversial military action of the Falklands War. This is the story of a diary written onboard the British submarine that fired the torpedoes, the diary that proved Thatcher's government hadn’t told the truth about what happened. Listen to the new six-part podcast series hosted by Andrew O’Hagan.

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Two Years with Zola

Brandon Taylor

Zola’s naturalism not only holds that one can shape and change one’s fate, but that it is a moral necessity to do so, at least in the extra-literary dimension that is life. For his characters, things are a bit bleaker. 

Short Cuts

No Safe Routes

Frances Webber

In February 2015 Shamima Begum and two friends left East London for Syria, where they joined Islamic State. Soon after they arrived, they were married to IS fighters. At the time, senior police, the courts and even the Home Office saw them as victims of grooming and trafficking. As late as January 2019, the Home Office claimed to ‘consider minors, assessed to have been...

Think Differently

Think Differently

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Why do we sleep?

Mike Jay

Whydo we sleep? The habit is pretty much universal among animals, though it takes a wide variety of forms. Many hibernate; a dolphin sleeps with half its brain at a time, so it can keep surfacing for air; Arctic reindeer continue ruminating while in non-REM sleep; and the Antarctic chinstrap penguin, we learned last year, fits thousands of four-second ‘microsleeps’ into the...

From the blog

On the Crocus City Hall Attack

James Meek

26 March 2024

Mass murder at a Moscow light entertainment venue, where 140 people were gunned down at point blank range as they gathered to watch the nostalgic rock of the elderly band Picnic, may have promoted the long hand of Islamic State Khurasan Province to donors and potential recruits, but it changes nothing for the organisation where it most wants things to change, at home.

Diary

Leaving Haiti

Pooja Bhatia

On​ 2 March, armed men broke into two prisons in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, and released almost five thousand inmates. The ratatatat of automatic gunfire sounded continuously throughout the city as the gangs torched buildings and had firefights with police. The US embassy, which since 2018 has warned Americans not to travel to Haiti, sent an email strongly advising its citizens to...

 

Cold War Liberalism

Stephen Holmes

Samuel Moyn​ didn’t begin his career as a crusading left-wing critic of liberalism. His earliest writings were on 20th-century French intellectual history: erudite studies of Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Pierre Vidal-Naquet. But he always had an interest in foreign policy as actually practised and in 1999, while still a graduate student, he interned at...

 

On Justin Torres

Emily Witt

Jan Gay​ was born Helen Reitman in Leipzig in 1902. She came out as a lesbian in young adulthood, studied under the German sexologist Magnus Hirshfield, started a nudist colony with her partner, Zhenya, and eventually collected interviews with hundreds of queer women in European cities, in the hope that writing up their sexual histories would help make lesbianism more accepted. When she...

 

Last Gasp Apparitions

Michael Ledger-Lomas

Andrew Lang​ was in Oxford when he first encountered the living dead. One autumn night in 1869, he passed John Conington, professor of Latin, staring silently at Corpus Christi College. Nothing odd about a distracted don, except that Lang soon learned that Conington had, at that moment, been breathing his last in Boston, Lincolnshire. Years later, he discussed this ‘real or sham...

At the Bodleian

‘Chaucer Here and Now’

Philip Knox

One​ of the frustrating things about Chaucer is that the literary archive only begins at the time of his death in 1400. No earlier manuscripts containing his writings survive. This means that we don’t know how his works circulated in his lifetime, what he wanted them to look like, which of the competing versions he preferred, or even, in any detail, who his first readers were. There...

 

Halldór Laxness does both

Michael Hofmann

If geography​ isn’t destiny, it comes close. Consider Iceland, at the apex of the North Atlantic. From there, one leg of a pair of dividers drops south to the Scandinavian ports and Scotland, and then to the rest of what one thinks of as Europe. The other leg gives prime access, through a little-used window in the Hudson Bay, to Canada and the United States. That’s it,...

From the archive

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra

In​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments...

Close Readings 2024

In our pioneering podcast subscription, contributors explore different areas of literature through a selection of key works. This year it’s Adam Shatz with Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards on revolutionary thought of the 20th century, Thomas Jones and Emily Wilson on truth and lies in Greek and Roman literature and Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell on satire. Listen to all three series for just £4.99 a month or £49.99 for the year.

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LRB Winter Lectures 2024

Buy tickets here for this year's Winter Lectures at St James Church, Clerkenwell: Pankaj Mishra on the Shoah after Gaza, Hazel V. Carby on decolonising history and Terry Eagleton on the origins of culture.

Read more about LRB Winter Lectures 2024
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