Europe’s leading magazine of politics, literature, history and ideas, published twice a month. Follow us on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lrb.co.uk
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‘The only European society that has tried to learn from its vicious past is clearly struggling to remember its main lesson.’
Pankaj Mishra on Germany’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian expression:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/…
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‘The level of urban starvation in Gaza has not been seen since the Dutch Hunger Winter and the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.’
Alex de Waal on Gaza, Israel and the vexed definitions of famine: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n02/…
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Pankaj Mishra’s new essay ‘The Big Con’ has had an huge impact in India — in fact it’s the second most-read piece on our website so far this year.
350 million Indians went to sleep hungry in 2022, he writes, a number that’s almost doubled in just 4 years:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n08/…
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‘Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History’, a new documentary by @antwilks, is now online.
The film traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, with help from the observations of MI5.
Watch it here now!
piped.video/wVQ4dfC34TI
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Lucy Prebble: 'Everybody has a Harvey story. Mine is unlurid but revealing.' lrb.co.uk/2017/10/13/lucy-pr…
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‘I love you and I always have, but we have philosophical differences over grammar, verb tenses and time itself.’
Overheard in the office just now.
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‘The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom mentioned reason wildfires increasingly incinerate such spectacular swathes of luxury real estate.’
Mike Davis, from 2007: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n22/…
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The only writer we’ve ever described as ‘luminous’ was Lucia Berlin, for her short stories.
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n05/…
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Assange and WikiLeaks did what all journalists should do, which is to make important information available to the public, enabling people to make evidence-based judgments about the actions of their governments.
Patrick Cockburn:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/…
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‘When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted.’
Hilary Mantel wrote many wonderful pieces for the LRB and we’d hoped she’d write many more: lrb.co.uk/contributors/hilar…
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‘In the mid-1960s Vernon Jordan, the head of the Urban League, asked Nina Simone how come she wasn’t “more active in civil rights”. “Motherfucker, I am civil rights,” she replied.’
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
From 2016, John Lahr on Nina Simone, born #onthisday:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n12/…
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In 1983, we published an essay by Oliver Sacks with the title 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat.' Here it is: lrb.co.uk/v05/n09/oliver-sac…
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‘Romanticising Palestinians, expecting us to show our strength, resilience and patience throughout it all, imposes mythical terms on our experience and our everyday struggles. It obscures our humanity.’
New on the blog from @MalakaShwaikh:
lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/january/…
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‘“I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,” Matthew Rankin said.’
Saleem Vaillancourt on Rankin’s film ‘Universal Language’: lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/january/…
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‘The liquidation of Gaza, though outlined and broadcast by its perpetrators, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony.’
Pankaj Mishra, in his LRB Winter Lecture of 28 February. Read it here:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/…
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‘Tigray, which once had one of the best healthcare systems in Ethiopia, now lies in ruins. It is estimated that more than 80 per cent of health facilities across the region have been looted and destroyed.’
@SophieCousins on the blog:
lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/august/t…
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'Women are seen as taking something to which they are not naturally entitled.' Watch the full @wmarybeard lecture: lrb.me/kuk
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We’re delighted to announce that the new lrb.co.uk is now live and – surprise! – we’ve disappeared the paywall. Our archive, containing 17,500 pieces & much more, is available for all to read, without limits, until 15/1. Stand by for suggestions and happy Christmas!
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Ian Hacking, who died yesterday aged 87, wrote 28 pieces for the LRB between 1986 and 2013, on the philosophy of mind, deafness, Iris Murdoch, metaphysics and organ transplants, among other things.
You can read Hacking’s pieces in our online archive here:
lrb.co.uk/contributors/ian-h…
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Sexual harassment brings mental life to a standstill. It destroys the mind’s capacity for reverie.
lrb.co.uk/v40/n04/jacqueline…
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‘There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous.’
Pankaj Mishra on the instrumentalisation of the Shoah:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/…
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This is how the LRB used to be put together.
Watch the full film about The Lost Art of Paste-Up: piped.video/CwrePe4-ID4
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‘I say to myself, it’s just a matter of attention; turn the page, pay attention, try again. I try again; I am wrong. Life slips one more notch towards barbarity.’
Anne Carson on trying to write with Parkinson’s: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n16/…
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'I get the sense that Jia Tolentino must feel overwhelming pity for ugly women, if she has ever met one'
Lauren Oyler reviews 'Trick Mirror' lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n02/…
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‘Most of the results from Saturday’s presidential and national assembly elections in Nigeria are in … and the general consensus among both Nigerians and the foreign observers is that the voting was rigged.’
@majapearce for the LRB blog:
lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/march/wh…
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This prerogative act may be open to legal challenge on more than one ground. And the challenges now being brought before the courts in Edinburgh and London could well be of lasting constitutional significance.
A new essay by Stephen Sedley: lrb.co.uk/v41/n17/stephen-se…
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Our new issue is now online. For the first time in the LRB's history, it contains just one piece (alongside the usual columns): Andrew O’Hagan’s investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire and its political aftermath.
lrb.co.uk
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‘Marxism is about leisure, not labour.’
Read Terry Eagleton’s 2024 Winter Lecture, online now: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/…
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‘Derrida’s conception of politics was quite old-fashioned, perhaps pre-Kantian: for him, politics was concerned not with designing a new society but with responding to random conflicts thrown up by the ordinary chaos of social existence.’
Jonathan Rée: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/…
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Watch Pankaj Mishra's talk in full on YouTube:
piped.video/watch?v=_w3Pe00I…
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Nice bag, cousin.
The 𝘓𝘙𝘉 special edition tote, now in our summer sale:
lrbstore.co.uk/collections/c…
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‘No populism, right or left, has so far produced a powerful remedy for the ills it denounces. The contemporary opponents of neoliberalism are still for the most part whistling in the dark.’
Online early: Perry Anderson on neoliberalism after the crash.
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/…
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Alan Bennett watches #LoveIsland in his 2017 diary: lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/alan-benne…
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‘Bombs manufactured in Texas are fitted with precision-guidance systems from Missouri, shipped to Europe, then flown, perhaps via British bases in Cyprus, to Israel before being dropped on Gaza.’
@tomfstevenson on ‘transnational’ elements in the Gaza war
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/…
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‘We call on our governments to demand an immediate ceasefire and the unimpeded admission of humanitarian aid into Gaza.’
An open letter on the situation in Palestine, signed by 600 writers and artists.
lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/…
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‘When and where does our condemnation begin and end?’
Judith Butler on violence, new online now:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/…
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Jenny Diski’s 150 articles (and 65 blogs) for the LRB are all now freely available to read online: lrb.co.uk/contributors/jenny…
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‘He was telling jokes about Bertrand Russell at a time when the undergraduate audience scarcely knew who Russell was, so it is no surprise to read here that he consorted with his fellow Footlights only when performing.’ Clive James on Jonathan Miller: lrb.co.uk/v05/n16/clive-jame…
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‘The belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time.’
Adam Shatz, online early:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/…
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The 𝘓𝘙𝘉 turns 45 today. Our first
ever issue was dated 25 October 1979. Here it is: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v01/n01
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‘Today, Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans, including some historians, consider Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.’
Eric Foner on Abraham Lincoln, John Brown and abolition:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n24/…
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Should you need an approximately literary joke to accompany Christmas dinner – a letter to the editor from December 2010:
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‘When I arrived, I found a letter from Sartre and Beauvoir waiting for me at the hotel. “For security reasons,” the message ran, “the meetings will be held at the home of Michel Foucault.”’
Read Edward Said's encounter with Sartre in the archive: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n11/…
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‘Lenin liked London primarily because he had fallen in love. The object of his love was the British Museum – or rather, the great circular reading room of the library.’
Sheila Fitzpatrick on Lenin in London:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n01/…
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𝘋𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘴 is an autobiographical comic by Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton about the two years she spent working in the Alberta oil sands to pay off her student debts.
It cost her more than she anticipated, as Sarah Resnick shows:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/…
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‘Alice Munro’s genius, as she imagines what is going on inside the closed worlds of individual lives, has to do with her exceptional openness to other people’s words, to the shapes of their understanding and their ways of seeing.’
Tessa Hadley, in 2007:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n02/…
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‘If we are to achieve an energy transition, it will not follow a familiar timetable. It must mark a fundamental break with an otherwise irresistible logic of accumulation.’
@adam_tooze on the history of energy: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/…
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ELECTION NIGHT TWITTER TAKEOVER!
Tomorrow evening, between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. (GMT), we’ll be handing over the keys to our Twitter account to a star-studded line-up of friends. Here’s who’ll be on when: tweets their own and won’t reflect the LRB &c. &c. See you here, then!
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‘Modi has counted on sympathetic journalists and financial speculators in the West to cast a seductive veil over his version of political economy, environmental activism and history.’
New, from Pankaj Mishra: The Big Con
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n08/…
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‘His appearances on TV had an immeasurable impact on the lives of post-migrant kids growing up in the 1970s who didn't want to be athletes or singers or dancers. He really did seem to say a life of the mind was a possibility.’
@neepmail on Stuart Hall:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/…
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Tom Verlaine’s 50,000 books are a ‘reminder of different days in a different city’, Alex Abramovich writes, ‘where the bookstores and record stores stayed open late, and you could poke around in them even after a night out at CBGB . . .
lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/march/at…
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What, in the end, is she actually saying? But surely she has told us that herself, and all along. What she is saying, standing in the corner of every piece, holding her yellow legal pad and watching, is: ‘I was there.’
@TriciaLockwood on Joan Didion: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n01/…
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We're pleased to be able to share it! The video’s ad-free on our website here:
lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-video…
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Colm Tóibín writes from Los Angeles.
Read him here: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n01/…
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While most of the children born to white fathers and black mothers in 18th-century Jamaica remained in slavery, thousands of boys and girls were sent to England and Scotland. What happened to them?
Catherine Hall on 'persons outside the law':
lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/catherine-…
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Just posted: 'The Killing of Osama bin Laden' by Seymour Hersh lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-…
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‘The mantra on everyone’s lips is a blunt statement of Krugman’s position. Do not repeat the mistakes of the early Obama administration. Go large.’
@adam_tooze on Paul Krugman:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n08/…
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Anyone who claims that Labour’s leftward shift was the product of a cultish devotion to one man, and will disappear on his departure, doesn’t understand its origins or its implications.
lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/december…
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‘A necessary consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on its memory.’
Pankaj Mishra’s 28 February Winter Lecture, ‘The Shoah after Gaza’, is online now:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/…
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Always asking the important questions.
Read here: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n02/…
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‘It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous.’
Pankaj Mishra:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/…
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White supremacy and fascism did not start with Trump and it won’t end even if this election ends him. Police violence is not an anomaly or series of isolated incidents. It’s part of a maintained system of racialized state violence and repression. It’s as old as the US itself.
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‘The palace is being furnished at colossal expense; after perusing Italian luxury furniture catalogues, Navalny’s team established the cost of many individual items, the choicest being a gold-plated toilet brush that apparently costs €700.’
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n04/…
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‘The Indian Ocean was an important hunting ground: more than a third of 𝘔𝘰𝘣𝘺-𝘋𝘪𝘤𝘬 takes place there. Melville recognised that whaling went hand in hand with colonial conquest.’
@LalehKhalili on the Indian Ocean’s geopolitics: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n21/…
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Ahdaf Soueif on why she's resigned from the British Museum’s Board of Trustees:
lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/july/on-…
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We’re delighted to announce that MANTEL PIECES: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing from the ‘London Review of Books’, by Hilary Mantel, will be published by @4thEstateBooks and the LRB on 1 October 2020.
Details of how to pre-order your copy from the @LRBbookshop to follow.
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'Edward Snowden’s Education':
@xlorentzen reviews 'Permanent Record'
lrb.co.uk/v41/n18/christian-…
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NEW: James Butler (@piercepenniless) asks, in typical style, what’s a majority for?
‘Labour’s programme is curiously bifurcated: its diagnoses are trenchant, its remedies anaemic. Studied vacuity will be unsustainable.’
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n14/…
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‘Perry Anderson is as interested in the way arguments are constructed as in what they postulate. He moves easily from literary into moral inquiry, from questions of quality to questions of character and stance.’
Christopher Clark on Anderson’s new book: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n23/…
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lit brat summer: mylrb.co.uk/FLTW0624
things I received in the post today: my smear test results, a 30 pack of condoms, my poll card, the LRB and an SHL test kit…. now THATS brat summer
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Gaza poet Refaat Alareer and @ProfARichardson were working together on a project digitising Thomas Hardy’s letters.
‘The last time I heard from him he had been discussing 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘹𝘦𝘯 with his students. He was killed in an airstrike on 7 December.’
lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/december…
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With her new translation of the Iliad, ten years in the making, @EmilyRCWilson gives us a complete Homer for a new generation.
On 2 October she came to Conway Hall to discuss her work, and Juliet Stevenson and @TobiasMenzies read passages.
Watch here:
piped.video/watch?v=_wGFMMBr…
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Been weighing up whether to retweet this all afternoon, decided it's probably worth it in order to re-up: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/…
Can't wait to read Trump's funny, devastating, but ultimately life-affirming essay about surviving COVID-19 in the London Review of Books.
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‘Dien Bien Phu was one of the decisive battles of the post-1945 era. Not since the British were turfed out of Afghanistan in the 19th century had an indigenous army inflicted so resounding a defeat on a colonial power.’
@chrismullinexmp in Vietnam: lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/may/at-d…
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‘I was tempted to record the cause of death as “weak health system for poor people”, “uninsured”, “fell through gaping hole in safety net” or “too poor to survive catastrophic illness” … these were “stupid deaths”.’
Paul Farmer, 1959-2022, in the LRB: lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/february…
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‘I think of what has come to my city as “the great withdrawal”. People on the street often seem to have their eyes elsewhere, usually on their phones: they might video a crime, but they might also not notice it’s happening.’
New, by @RebeccaSolnit:
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/…
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'Virtually everything that nationalists say about the past is wrong.'
– Eric Hobsbawm, in a new film about his life and work, from @antwilks
Watch it here now!
piped.video/wVQ4dfC34TI
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Gary Indiana, who has died at the age of 74, wrote six pieces for the LRB between 2003 and 2015, including pieces on William Burroughs, Kathy Acker and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Read them here: lrb.co.uk/contributors/gary-…
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a passionate presence on Twitter, author of two crucial books--"The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America" & "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump & the Erosion of America."
Sarah Kendzior, our Cassandra, now vindicated.
#BestResistanceTwitterer2016-2020
Sarah Kendzior "our Cassandra"--one of the most eloquent, informative, crucial observers of the T***p phenomenon: the election of, strengthening of, enabling of autocracy shaping before our eyes.
unfortunately, like Cassandra, Sarah was unheeded.
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‘Kraftwerk seemed to be aiming at a kind of electronic Esperanto, an imaginary universal language that anyone could learn, anyone could speak, anyone could dance to.’
@owenhatherley on the late Florian Schneider
lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/may/danc…
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‘What I really love to read about, and to write about, are experiences that are, in fact, completely banal but that don’t necessarily conform to our narratives about what normality is.’
Watch all of Sally Rooney’s @LRBbookshop event on #NormalPeople here: lrb.me/b8h
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‘Instead of insisting that Imane Khelif is a “real” woman, we should ask how dichotomous ideas of gender have been solidified in the discourse that is being mobilised against her.’
@mireia_garces on combatting ‘the reactionary weaponisation of gender’.
lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/august/f…
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‘The memory of the Shoah did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945; it was constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends.’
Watch Pankaj Mishra's LRB Winter Lecture in full on YouTube:
piped.video/watch?v=_w3Pe00I…
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We've removed the paywall for Perry Anderson's essay on Brazil:
lrb.co.uk/v41/n03/perry-ande…
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‘Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.’
We’ve brought Alan Bennett’s story ‘The Uncommon Reader’, first published in the LRB in 2007, in front of the paywall for the next few days: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n05/…
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‘Protest is a mode of public speech, which – like free discussion – is vital to democracy.’
@amiasrinivasan on open letters and campus protests, online early from our next issue.
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/…
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Salman Rushdie on Gabriel García Márquez lrb.me/1dQMicD
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‘If David wants to get his daughter in he should obviously start giving money.’
@DebFriedell on what WikiLeaks revealed about Ivy League admissions lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/04/20/de… #LRBarchive
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‘Israel cannot imagine a future with its neighbours or its own Palestinian citizens in which it would no longer rely on force.’
Adam Shatz on Israel’s descent, online early: lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/…
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'Among the great ecological disasters of the 21st century is the fact that the assassin who stabbed Bolsonaro in the chest during his 2018 presidential campaign did not succeed in killing the man'
Benjamin Kunkel on the fires in Brazil
lrb.co.uk/v41/n17/benjamin-k…
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