- Magazine
- Magazine
‘It makes me look a bit tipsy’ – last year, Alan Bennett got a new hat. Other things happened to him too. Listen to him read his 2017 diary from the latest issue, in full, by subscribing to the LRB podcast, on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts: lrb.co.uk/audio
‘On 31 December, Forbes projected that All the Money in the World would earn $14.4 million at the box office in its first eight days – a sum that will more than cover the cost of the nine-day erasure. The success may have consequences. The long history of abusive artists in leading parts may invite a more imaginative extension of the cleansing. Take a bankable male who has not yet been accused and digitally insert him in, say, all the Marlon Brando scenes of A Streetcar Named Desire.’
One thing the unrest in Iran shows is that reform within the establishment is a failed promise which people no longer believe in.
‘Sixty-five Lord Mayors since 1905 have been Masons’ – Caroline Moorehead on freemasonry in the British establishment, from 1984.
‘Students, by definition, have a lot to learn. Academics, by and large, are a self-selected group of natural conformists: they have got where they are by doing well at school, which typically requires deference and obedience to authority. Alone, neither camp looks well placed to rescue England’s universities. In concert, it is just possible that an effective combination of discipline and disobedience might be forthcoming. If it isn’t, then perhaps the universities do not deserve to be saved.’
Our 2018 Winter Lectures at the British Museum will be delivered by Rosemary Hill (on frock consciousness), Anne Enright (on Adam and Eve) and Linda Colley (can history help?) – they always sell out so buy your tickets sooner rather than later!
‘Metamorphosed by an unusual sensibility’ – Gavin Stamp on Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art, after the fire, from 2014.
‘Like many dominant politicians, he had the strength of his weaknesses and the weaknesses of his strengths’ – David Runciman on Gordon Brown, from the latest issue.
Iran, like the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, is becoming harder to govern.
‘It was New Year’s Eve / again. Time to get out the punchbowl, / make some resolutions, / I don’t think.’
A poem by the very much missed John Ashbery concludes our melancholy Christmas list: lrb.co.uk/archive/12-poems
‘Well, I must say, every morning I wake up and think: “How wonderful, I don’t have to go to the Sunday Times”’ – Francis Wyndham talks about himself, from the archive.
‘What do we do with the wanwood when the new year comes? In the 16th century, after the feast and the dancing, the tree would be ceremonially burned, marking the end of festivities with a final brilliant spectacle, which does seem better than leaving it on the street for the council to collect.’
Alice Spawls on Christmas trees, from the archive.
‘Jonathan Meades is the Jonathan Meades of our generation,’ reads a puff-quote by the late A.A. Gill on the cover of Meades’s new cookbook, ‘The Plagiarist in the Kitchen’, but it’s hard to think of any patch less in need of a Jonathan Meades than English food writing.
Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson began working in the Calais Jungle in 2015, where they set up Good Chance Theatre in a fit of naive solidarity. The Good Chance tent came down with the rest of the Jungle’s makeshift infrastructure in 2016. ‘The Jungle’, until 9 January at the Young Vic Theatre, resuscitates the energy of Good Chance with a superb and lengthy retrospective of the Jungle’s heyday, casting three actors who came through Calais, and four or five other asylum seekers who arrived by other routes.
(Far) more retweets than all the pieces in our Christmas issue, combined…
Full archive access means subscribers can read every letter we’ve ever published: https://buff.ly/2lhPhBC
