London Review of Books

From the blog

Eric Hobsbawm in the ‘London Review’

Richard J. Evans

9 April 2021

Eric Hobsbawm, the subject of a new documentary film by Anthony Wilks, wrote 24 pieces for the London Review of Books, the first in April 1981, the last in April 2012, a few months before his death at the age of 95.

Story

‘Gladly!’

Diane Williams

He is a figure I once engaged with for years, amid scenes with nearly religious significance attached to them.

And by chance, this Saturday, I had witnessed him stepping away from a park path and stooping beneath the leaf cover – only to put his hand against the tree trunk.

He smiled when he saw me, but when I reached him he was speechless and sour, and then he proceeded on his way...

From the archive

Philip’s People

Anna Della Subin

‘Don’t talk about God – be it! Find the place, the formula … Ah, Larry, it isn’t that life is so short, it’s that it’s everlasting!’ Henry Miller wrote to Lawrence Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and...

Versions of Meritocracy

Stefan Collini

We are asked to believe in a world in which individual agents are in full possession of undivided selves, unshaped by social determinants, and able to realise outcomes simply by willing them strongly enough. It is assumed that there is an uncomplicated thing called ‘talent’ or ‘ability’, and that some people have more of it than others. It is also assumed – pretty much as a fact of nature, it seems – that some people will make more ‘effort’ and work ‘harder’ than others. Meritocracy proposes to rearrange the world (shouldn’t take long) so that, for those who combine ability and effort, every day is Christmas Day. At the same time, in much recent social science, unmasking the sham of ‘equality of opportunity’ has become a familiar five-finger exercise. Study after study suggests that where people get to in life is largely determined by where they start. But the very fact that it is so easy to assemble the evidence for this truth gives the literature on the topic a slightly tired, stale character.

It is assumed that there is an uncomplicated thing called ‘talent’ or ‘ability’, and that some people have more of it than others. It is also assumed – pretty much as a fact of nature, it seems – that some people will make more ‘effort’ and work ‘harder’ than others. Meritocracy proposes to rearrange the world (shouldn’t take long) so that, for those who combine ability and effort, every day is Christmas Day.

‘Rave’

Harry Strawson

When I ask my friends, they don’t remember their early raves either – just the venue, perhaps (a warehouse somewhere near the eastern end of the District line; a splinter of wood land beside a busy road in Hackney Wick; a squat with a full-size skate bowl off Brick Lane); and what drugs they took (ecstasy and mephedrone), but not, in any concrete sense, what happened or what music was playing or who was playing it. No one had an answer when I asked: ‘What was your first rave really like?’ This is the question that Rainald Goetz and his cast of narrators set out to answer in Rave.

In the latest issue

1 April 2021

UbuWeb

Gill Partington

In 1988 the veteran conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, having built a career on the most experimental of repertoires, sat at the piano to record a ditty about a constipation remedy. The music was his, but he had lifted the words – verbatim – from an advertisement that had appeared many years earlier in the Saturday Evening Post. ‘Children cry for Castoria!’ Slonimsky...

Perhaps the internet doesn’t so much reboot the avant-garde as make the whole concept obsolete: it has its own home-grown provocateurs in the form of trolls and shitposters and arguably its own culture, the emergent contours of which have become visible over recent years in new visual languages of gifs and emojis, and in exponential layers of ironic memes. With an online world so disorienting and surreal, why do we need actual surrealists?

A Masterpiece and a Disaster

Joe Dunthorne

There are few suicide notes more ecstatic than those of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, who died together on 21 November 1811. ‘May heaven grant you a death even half as joyous and inexpressibly cheerful as mine,’ Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of...

On Charles Wright

Matthew Bevis

Charles Wright’s Oblivion Banjo – published in advance of his 85th birthday (Farrar, Straus, £20) – is somewhere between a Collected and Selected and begins with a homage to Ezra Pound:

Today is one of those daysOne swears is a prophecy:The air explicit and moist,As though filled with unanswered prayers

This sounds like the day everything started for Wright. After...

Finishing Oblivion Banjo, I was left in a Wright-like quandary: ‘I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what.’ The book offers itself as ‘the perfect distillation’ of his life’s work, but this is a little counterintuitive, partly because the poems have the air of unfinished business, and partly because the later volumes are less powerful than the earlier ones: Wright sometimes appears to be leaning on the gnomic rather than thinking with it.

From the blog

Eric Hobsbawm in the ‘London Review’

Richard J. Evans

9 April 2021

Eric Hobsbawm, the subject of a new documentary film by Anthony Wilks, wrote 24 pieces for the London Review of Books, the first in April 1981 . . .

Hot Water

Rahmane Idrissa

9 April 2021

Last year in Dakar, running an errand near Sandaga market in the centre of town, I came across an armoured personnel carrier belonging to the . . .

Gang of Four 77-81

Alex Abramovich

8 April 2021

Some songs are like sculptures; almost physical objects taking up space in a room. Gang of Four’s songs are like that: weighty things . . .

In Bristol

Rebecca Ruth Gould

7 April 2021

The first demonstration against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill took place in Bristol on 21 March. It has been followed by demos . . .

Pharaohs on Parade

Hussein A.H. Omar

6 April 2021

On Holy Saturday, as Christians around the world held vigil for the entombed Christ, twenty-two of Egypt’s mummified former monarchs – . . .

Welcome to Montero

Niela Orr

2 April 2021

‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’, a sermon delivered by Jonathan Edwards in Massachusetts and Connecticut in July 1741, takes . . .

In Disrepair

David Renton

1 April 2021

In May 2020, one of my clients asked the local authority – her landlord – when essential maintenance work would start at her home . . .

Imaginary Movie Star Boyfriend

Joanna Biggs

31 March 2021

‘If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author,’ William Godwin wrote in 1798 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters . . .

Podcasts & Videos

More Podcasts & Videos

Video

Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History

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...

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Adam Curtis

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This week David talks to the celebrated film-maker Adam Curtis about his new series Can't Get You Out of My Head, which tells the history of the rise and fall of individualism. Plus much more: Nixon, China, Dominic Cummings, complex systems, Max Weber and conspiracy theories.

Podcast

Try, Try, Try Again

Diane Williams and Thomas Jones

Diane Williams talks to Thomas Jones about her short stories, and reads her latest two published in the LRB.

Read and listen to more stories by Diane Williams here.

Photograph by Bill Hayward

Video

Patricia Lockwood and John Lanchester: No One is Talking About This

Patricia Lockwood talks to John Lanchester about her debut novel No One is Talking About This.

Find Patricia's pieces for the LRB here.

Find John's pieces for the LRB here.

Buy Patricia's and John's books here.

Podcast

Into the UbuVerse

Gill Partington and Thomas Jones

Gill Partington and Thomas Jones explore Kenneth Goldsmith’s online avant-garde archive, UbuWeb, listen to some of the things you can find on it, and consider what might not be found there.

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text can be found here

Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue

Image: Nicolas Slonimsky in 1933 (Alamy)

Podcast

On Derek Walcott

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.

Video

Geoff Dyer and Frances Wilson on D.H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. Subjects covered in this freewheeling volume include art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death...

Video

Is it OK to have children?

Meehan Crist

Given what we know about the future of the planet, is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us? Meehan Crist explores the debate about the ethics of childbearing in the age of climate crisis. She addresses the relationship between BP and the British Museum, the implications of culture-washing, and the logic of...

Video

Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan

Richard Lloyd Parry

Akihito, who abdicated in April, was a paradoxical figure: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right. Richard Lloyd Parry considers the former emperor’s part in the intellectual and political debate over Japan’s wartime record, and its...

Video

Fiction and the Age of Lies

Colin Burrow

The line between making a fiction and telling a lie has been blurry at least since Homer, and liars – from Odysseus and Iago to Austen’s Wickham and beyond – have often played central parts within fictions. This lecture will aim to tell some (though not all) of the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction from Homer to Ian McEwan, and will ask if fiction has...

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15 April 2021 at 7:00pm

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In the next issue, which will be dated 22 April: Adam Tooze on US economic policy, Rivka Galchen on the brain and Julian Barnes on Jewish art collectors.

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