London Review of Books

London Review of Books Europe’s leading magazine of politics, literature, history and ideas, published twice a month. Read and subscribe at lrb.co.uk

The London Review of Books is Europe’s leading magazine of politics, literature, history and ideas, published twice a month.

‘The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however...
03/01/2026

‘The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however securitised, are porous. Drop a pin on the map, anywhere on the map, and that’s your point of origin, from which everything flows. Milwaukee, the factory on Juneau Avenue: origin of the Harley-Davidson Flatheads that are driven over the Carpathian mountains by Hungarian motorcycle fiends. Fiume, the Whitehead Torpedo Factory: origin of the self-propelled torpedoes that armed the US navy. Pynchon shows the way ripples from the political earthquake in Berlin are felt in the bowling alleys of Milwaukee, and the music sung in a Chicago cocktail lounge is received and remodulated in a nightclub on the Danube.

What’s unfathomable is how he does it: wherever Pynchon drops his pin, he seems to know the place, and the time, in every detail, with street-level precision. How does he know that if a detective in Chicago in 1932 pulls a bottle out of his desk drawer it’s going to be a pint of Old Log Cabin, but that if he’s in Milwaukee it’ll be Korbel brandy? How does he have time to learn about the Milwaukeean shoe stores that used fluoroscopes to X-ray a customer’s foot for the perfect fit? I wish I could see his library.’

Daniel Soar on 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘸 𝘛𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵, from our latest issue.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/daniel-soar/land-of-milk-and-cheese

Image: Night time in Chicago, circa 1920-1950. (James W. Welgos/Getty)

‘It is​ one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a...
01/01/2026

‘It is​ one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a room to come, framed in a tall narrow door. There are windows opening onto Fifth Avenue. Light hits the sculpture from the left – light from the east, strong and steady. And always, whether it’s years or days since the last time I stood here, it is the colour of the stone that takes me by surprise. Surely before it wasn’t this 𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘬! And what an inadequate word! The stone isn’t flesh-coloured or rosy-fingered, it isn’t male or female, it isn’t flushed with blood. Maybe, on the plaited hair and immaculate eyelids, it looks a little “made up”. It is stone partaking of life.’

T.J. Clark on a Kouros at the Met, from our latest issue.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/t.j.-clark/a-kouros-at-the-met

Image: Marble kouros (c.590-80 bce). (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

‘There’s a shoegaze revival underway, and it’s youth-led, and characteristically trans. These latest shoegazers started ...
31/12/2025

‘There’s a shoegaze revival underway, and it’s youth-led, and characteristically trans. These latest shoegazers started in home recording during the months and years of Covid and quarantine, when young people (sometimes the same young people) also jump-started the jittery, obviously synthesised, pitch-shifted music called hyperpop. With nowhere to go except online, young musicians crafted songs whose opaqueness and inward-turned artifice fit their own lives. Often those lives were trans.

New Jersey’s Jane Remover became internet-famous in the 2010s for electronic dance music and hyperpop, came out as trans in 2020, and switched to mid-tempo guitars for the partly acoustic 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘵𝘺 (2021) and the louder, stronger 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘴 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 (2023). On her EP ♡, released in December 2025, the old fuzz effects join new ones derived from dance music, as Jane insists (on “How to Teleport”), in her noise-covered, pitch-shifted alto, “I didn’t know I could break like other dolls if the parts could hit the ground.” (Dolls don’t have to be trans girls, but here they are, as in the garments advising “Protect the Dolls.”)’

Stephanie Burt on trans shoegaze, from the blog.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/december/shoegazing

Image: Album cover for 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘴 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 (2023) by Jane Remover, photographed by Brendon Burton.

On 1 February, at the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 and the City of London Sinfonia will j...
29/12/2025

On 1 February, at the Actors’ Church in Covent Garden, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴 and the City of London Sinfonia will join forces to pose a question nobody thought to ask during Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary year, through a programme of readings and music inspired by one of the paper’s most controversial pieces.

In 1995, the 𝘓𝘙𝘉 ran a piece with the cover line, ‘Was Jane Austen gay?’ Many people were horrified, including its author, the literary critic Terry Castle. Her essay, about Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra, was actually a subtle examination of ‘the primitive adhesiveness – and underlying eros – of the sister-sister bond.’ But that wasn’t how the 𝘋𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘛𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩 saw it…

As a postscript to Austen’s big birthday, the 𝘓𝘙𝘉 and CLS return to Castle’s piece for the latest in their acclaimed series of ‘concert essays’, after a sold-out performance at the 2025 Hay Festival. Readings from other texts – including Austen’s letters, novels, her nephew’s family memoir and her le***an contemporary Anne Lister’s diaries – will be interspersed with a live musical counterpoint. This will draw on works from Austen’s own music collection, and new arrangements by Isobel Waller-Bridge of her score for the 2020 film version of 𝘌𝘮𝘮𝘢.

The ensemble includes the celebrated organist and pianist James McVinnie and the soprano Anna Dennis.

Tickets available here: https://actorschurch.org/whatson/was-jane-austen-gay/

‘Samuel Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper, and his talent for storing and retrieving va...
27/12/2025

‘Samuel Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper, and his talent for storing and retrieving vast amounts of information would be useful to him throughout his career. Kate Loveman argues that the diary became his “catch-all” for anything he couldn’t safely or conveniently note in his official or household accounts. Into its pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the plays he saw, and the most intimate aspects of his life, from bodily functions (including what has been called “one of the best documented attacks of flatulence in history”) to sex.’

Deborah Friedell on the history of Pepys’s diary, from our latest issue.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/deborah-friedell/lifted-up

Image: ‘Portrait of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)’ by John Hayls, 1666.

‘Alchemists have been often written about as failed scientists, crippled by their spiritual beliefs, or as mystical phil...
26/12/2025

‘Alchemists have been often written about as failed scientists, crippled by their spiritual beliefs, or as mystical philosophers whose hours at the athanor are beneath notice. This philosophy can be tricky to pin down: partly because it changed shape, especially during the Renaissance, when translations of Neoplatonist and Gnostic texts from Greek and Arabic appeared, and partly because it differed from alchemist to alchemist. But at its core were the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythic composite of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian moon-god Thoth.

The most popular source for Hermes’ teachings was the 𝘌𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭𝘥 𝘛𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘵, a cryptic text which spread through Europe after it was translated into Latin in the 12th century. Its best-known line (“What is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below”) encapsulates the Hermetic view of reality, in which the microcosmic mirrors the macrocosmic: smaller systems reflect larger systems, at every scale. Chemical reactions reflect human dramas, which reflect celestial movements, which reflect the mind of the divine.

Hermes goes on: “All things came from the One ... All things are born from this One by adaptation ... This is the force of all forces, for it overcomes all that is subtle and penetrates solid things.” The alchemist’s lab work and the philosophy were inextricable: working with material substances was a sacred endeavour, because matter and spirit were modalities of the same substance.’

Nick Richardson on alchemy, from our latest issue.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/nick-richardson/puffing-on-the-coals

Image: Merc­urius, from a Rosicrucian compendium (1760).

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. 𝘈 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘢𝘴 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘭 sold si...
25/12/2025

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. 𝘈 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘢𝘴 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘭 sold six thousand copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s.

But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control.

In this long extract from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Thomas Jones to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.

Listen here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-lrb-podcast/id510327102

Image: ‘Marley's Ghost’, an illustration by John Leech from the 1843 edition of 𝘈 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘢𝘴 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘭. (The British Library)

‘Starmer’s perceived fragility means he has made little use of his landslide majority. Difficult decisions have been pos...
24/12/2025

‘Starmer’s perceived fragility means he has made little use of his landslide majority. Difficult decisions have been postponed, or were deferred until last month’s budget. Timidity is punctuated by spasmodic panic over Farage and authoritarian posturing over migration or crime. Backbenchers are truculent: many MPs elected on Labour’s extremely efficient 2024 vote, which was praised as strategic genius at the time, now face very thin majorities and the likelihood of wipeout at the next election. Incentives for loyalty are few. If, in January, it could be argued that the jury was still out on a relatively new government, by December that verdict has hardened. Starmer vies with Macron for the accolade of least popular European leader.’

James Butler on Labour’s year, from our latest issue.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/james-butler/short-cuts

Image: Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer at the annual Labour Party conference in Liverpool, 29 September 2025. (Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty)

‘Walter Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book 𝘗...
23/12/2025

‘Walter Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book 𝘗𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘤 𝘖𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘰𝘯, published in 1922. In a way that we might find startlingly relevant today, the book posits that modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become “their interior representations of the world” (such representations might explain Nigel Farage). Individual citizens cling to their fictional environments so thoroughly, Lippmann argued, that they could be living in different worlds from those who don’t share them. “More accurately,” he writes, “they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones ... [and] these fictions determine a very great part of men’s political behaviour.”

People reading newspapers, Lippmann observed, were not offended by stories of unfairness and corruption, they were offended by what those stories said about themselves, and taking public events personally proved habit-forming over the 20th century and into the 21st. If you look at the coverage of terrible events that gave rise to a disquiet about the play of fact and fiction in their reporting – from the Soviet famine to Vietnam, from the Falklands conflict to the Grenfell Tower fire – you can feel the imprint of Lippmann’s definition of enhanced opinion and manipulated fact.’

Andrew O’Hagan on the journalist Walter Lippmann, from our latest issue.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/andrew-o-hagan/fatal-realism

Image: Walter Lippmann photographed in 1936. (Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection/UCLA)

Still looking for a last-minute gift? Get them a subscription to the 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴.Gift subscriptions start fro...
22/12/2025

Still looking for a last-minute gift? Get them a subscription to the 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘯 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘴.

Gift subscriptions start from just £22.99/ $39.99 and are available here: https://www.mylrb.co.uk/X25F

‘Suleyman came to the throne in 1520, when he was 26. He had large shoes to fill. His father, Selim, had doubled the siz...
22/12/2025

‘Suleyman came to the throne in 1520, when he was 26. He had large shoes to fill. His father, Selim, had doubled the size of the empire during his eight years in power, and commentators in Western Europe at first viewed Suleyman as the lamb to Selim’s lion. He was quick to prove them wrong. In 1521 his army took Belgrade, the Danubian gateway to Central Europe; in 1522 he conquered Rhodes, that nest of Christian pirates; in 1526 he captured much of Hungary. The conquests continued in the years that followed, but by the 1540s Suleyman’s health was starting to deteriorate. He suffered from gout and oedema so acute that at times he could barely walk. As news of this state of affairs spread, the question of a successor began to present itself.

Ottoman succession practices cast all male dynasts as legitimate pretenders to the throne. On the death of the reigning sultan, his sons would race to Istanbul from their provincial governorships. The one with the greatest cunning, the best advisers, the most popular support and, hence, the support of God would be the fastest, and therefore make the best sultan. But to avoid the instability wrought by the dispossessed siblings, a tradition emerged whereby the victorious claimant would hunt down and kill his surviving brothers and, often, their sons. (Selim is thought to have spared Suleyman this fate by removing the other pretenders to his throne himself.)’

Helen Pfeifer on the life of Suleyman, from our latest issue.

Read here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/helen-pfeifer/turn-around-and-run

Image: Sultan Suleyman, c. 1530s. (Kunsthistorisches Museum/Wikimedia Commons)

‘To be a Garland fan is to have the illusion that you can save her from the wounds of the world, even as her voice and h...
18/12/2025

‘To be a Garland fan is to have the illusion that you can save her from the wounds of the world, even as her voice and her eyes and her gloriously melodic laugh seem instead to be saving you. Many fans harbour fantasies of looking after her, as Susie Boyt explores in “My Judy Garland Life”, by far the best Garland book I’ve read. Boyt surveyed a hundred Judy fans and found that most of them dreamed of caring for her, whether by brushing her hair, making her feel cherished in ways that MGM and most of her husbands failed to do, or keeping her away from pills.

Much as we may fantasise about comforting her, we will never know whether a happier Judy would have moved us as much. One of the great mysteries about Garland is the extent to which her vulnerability when performing was a calculated act. She seems to have had an excruciating need for validation as a performer: a neediness we can almost touch on screen. Yet she told Dirk Bogarde – her co-star in “I Could Go on Singing”, her final film – that she knew how to hurt audiences where they thought they wanted to be hurt. When trying to set the record straight about her life, she repeatedly rejected the idea that she was tragic or a victim, arguing that she should be seen as hard-working, happy and essentially comic. Certainly, as a performer, she had the most extraordinary ability to project a full-throated joy in her singing, even when life was not going well for her.’

Bee Wilson on Judy Garland, from our latest issue.

Read Wilson’s piece here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/bee-wilson/two-pins-and-a-lollipop

Or listen to Wilson discuss Garland’s life and work with Malin Hay on the LRB Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-lrb-podcast/id510327102?i=1000741638733

Image: Judy Garland, circa 1940. (Bettmann/Getty)

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