‘For​ Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist, Harry Carney, as dark blue hessian.’ Susannah Clapp on Edward Brooke-Hitching’s The Madman’s Orchestra: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Into his diary’s pages went 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 engaging but contradictory Samuel Pepys: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘No king before or since has written so thoughtfully about the nature of kingship. His “manual on kingcraft”, 𝘉𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘰𝘯 𝘋𝘰𝘳𝘰𝘯 (‘The King’s Gift’), became a bestseller.’ Alice Hunt on James VI and I: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘If de Bellaigue’s Suleyman reveals the occasional spark of fairness, the men who serve him are all darkness. Justice is a commodity sold to the highest bidder or the most geriatric mullah.’ Helen Pfeifer questions a new biography of Suleyman the Great: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Dimbleby was generous to the PLO. Maybe he looked well on their armed struggle because he thought it would favour the Palestinian case in the event of a settlement. If so, time has proved him wrong.’ Jeremy Harding on Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1979 book 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘗𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘴: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Egyptian sculpture – look again – is not stiff. Bodies made by the best Egyptian sculptors strike a unique balance between composure and intimation of movement.’ T.J. Clark on a Greek male statue at the Met, heavily inspired by Egyptian sculpture: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘He is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with interesting ones. But who is to say which is which?’ Michael Wood on Gaston Bachelard: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘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: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Voters for the historic duopoly mostly cite the lack of a better alternative that can plausibly win. If that sense changes, the floor will vanish beneath Labour’s feet.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on Britain’s political futures: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘My books are on a list of works that have been illegally used in training data. Many more people’s work has been stolen without any evidentiary trail to show it.’ John Lanchester on the AI bubble. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Indonesia has occupied West Papua since 1963. A media blackout means the scant press coverage is often drawn largely from Indonesian military press releases. What happened in Soanggama seems to have been less a “clash” than a massacre.’ Douglas Gerrard: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

‘Almost everyone was against the relationship. Venetian society, which had “tolerated all Byron’s previous sordid adventures”, could not countenance a proper romance.’ Clare Bucknell visits the house where Byron lived with his mistress and her husband. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Bourgeois described one piece as sporting “dear little labial accents”. “Have you ever seen latex used better?” she asked.’ Jo Applin on the connection between Louise Bourgeois’s New York house and her latex work. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

In the latest episode of Aftershock, Daniel Soar, @tomstevenson.bsky.social and Alex de Waal discuss financial warfare as a legacy of the War on Terror. Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...

‘There is an inescapable austerity to Howe’s lyricism – a Puritan insistence on abstraction, a poetry without ligatures, even as the elegiac tone grows stronger over the books of the last decade. Ange Mlinko on American poet Susan Howe. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Paracelsus, a vicious critic of Galenic doctors (“a misbegotten crew of approved asses”), transformed the field of alchemy by instructing his peers to make medicines, not gold.’ Nick Richardson on alchemy. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘For​ Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist as dark blue hessian.’ Susannah Clapp reviews ‘The Madman’s Orchestra’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘In the right circumstances, a popular rebellion against an unfit king would be an act of virtue. James never accepted this. Instead, he believed that tyranny had to be suffered “without resistance, but by sobs and tears to God”.’ Alice Hunt on James VI and I. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Editors silently rewrote passages that seemed tawdry, or just left them out; it was routine to excise Pepys’s sexual escapades while preserving his wife’s rages, which just made her seem unhinged.’ @deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Samuel Pepys’s diary. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Years after his book appeared, the Palestinian leadership gambled on civil rights, international law and non-violent co-existence as a balkanised state alongside Israel. This did not pay off either.’ Jeremy Harding on a reissued portrait of 1970s Palestinian life. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘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.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on the state we’re in. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Running through the heart of Netanyahu’s philosophy is the question of power.’ Jacqueline Rose on her encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Perhaps one in ten West Papuans has been a refugee in the last five years. By clearing Indigenous people from their land, the TNI both eases the extraction process and seeds future conflict: displacement allows extraction which leads to further displacement.’ www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

‘Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with interesting ones. But who is to say which is which?’ Michael Wood on the philosopher of science. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘In 1932, Wisconsin accounted for half of all US cheese production, with a great proportion of it controlled by a single company, Kraft. So it makes sense, in Pynchonworld, that behind everything must be a vast cheese conspiracy.’ Daniel Soar on 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘸 𝘛𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

after the argument drove past when all I really wanted to say was ‘look at that horse’ well maybe not 𝘢𝘭𝘭 I wouldn’t be this fluffed up if it were 𝘢𝘭𝘭 would I I wouldn’t be passing for sane ‘Lieu Vague’, a poem by Anne Carson. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘When Suleyman is not busy “bashing unbelievers” in The Golden Throne, he is sacking people for rudeness or watching prisoners be trampled by elephants.’ Helen Pfeifer on Suleyman the Magnificent. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘To understand the greatness of Judy Garland, don’t start with 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘖𝘻, where the effect of watching and hearing her sing “Over the Rainbow” a mere five minutes in is so exquisitely intense that it’s hard to retain your critical faculties.’ Bee Wilson: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The colour of the stone – the nakedness of the stone, the play between fleshiness and stoniness – was everything.’ T.J. Clark views a kouros at the Met. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The shamans of Siberia used the mushroom fly agaric to achieve ecstatic trances, drinking the urine of reindeer that had browsed on it. Our own Father Christmas may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult.’ Charles Nicholl on St Nick’s trippy past, from the archive. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v0...

‘Walter Lippmann was early to the table when it came to explaining that reality is not a choice one might make, not a thing to opt in and out of as suits your self-interest, but a bulwark against propaganda and censorship.’ Andrew O’Hagan on the liberal journalist. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality.’ — Rousseau @adamwithbooks.bsky.social on singularity as something we all have in common. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

‘There​ is a difference, I want to suggest, between allowing a rational fear of domination to shape our politics, and making that fear the totality of our politics.’ Amia Srinivasan on psychoanalysis, in her Winter Lecture of Friday 12 December. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Father Christmas marks the difference between little children who can be fooled and adults who cannot. The secret of his non-existence is the secret of the initiation rite.’ Wendy Doniger on an anthropological view of Christmas, in the archive. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v1...

‘The value of the world’s top ten companies is $25.6 trillion. Of that, $15.1 trillion has accumulated since 30 November 2022 and is directly linked to the AI boom.’ John Lanchester on the AI bubble. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘I came across an American whom I had seen a few times in the corner shop. He said Merry Christmas to me. It was like meeting a fellow-traveller in a far-off country.’ Iqbal Ahmed on Christmas as a ‘castaway’ in Britain, from the archive. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v2...

On shoegaze: ‘The volume on all those guitars was meant to shut the world out, to create a safe space behind high, thick walls of sound. And it seemed to carry no broader message, or social force: it wasn’t necessarily anything except its musical self. Till now.’ www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

‘The magic in Gaston Bachelard’s work is often wonderful, but it may be even more remarkable for what it doesn’t include, doesn’t invite to the eclectic seminar.’ Michael Wood on the philosopher of science. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘How does Thomas Pynchon 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?’ @danielsoar.bsky.social reads 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘸 𝘛𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Letter to the editor, December 2010 www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

‘In 1950, one pair of ladies’ white knickers (“retrieved from the 3rd Class Compartment”). On Christmas Eve 1955, a person left their false teeth on the 10.30 train to northern parts, but thankfully only “the upper set”.’ Andrew O’Hagan on lost property, in the archive www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

you were close with him your dad I think 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘳𝘶𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢 how would you describe this century so far 𝘢𝘭𝘭-𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 famously you have spoken of the uselessness of interviews 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘐 ‘Lieu Vague’, a poem by Anne Carson. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘To portray the Ottoman legal and political establishment as unremittingly venal and capricious is to miss the centrality of justice to Ottoman (and wider Islamic) political thought and practice.’ Helen Pfeifer on Suleyman the Magnificent. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘MGM encouraged Judy Garland’s use of drugs – “pep pills” to get her to work and suppress her appetite, downers to help her sleep – only to criticise her for being unreliable when she became an addict who sometimes couldn’t show up for work.’ @kitchenbee.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Dimbleby was generous to the PLO. Maybe he looked well on their armed struggle because he thought it would favour the Palestinian case in the event of a negotiated settlement. If so, time has proved him wrong.’ Jeremy Harding on a reissued portrait of 1970s Palestine. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘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.’ @piercepenniless.bsky.social on the state we’re in. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Adam Smyth (@adamwithbooks.bsky.social) asked people to film themselves reading Rousseau’s Confessions: ‘The idea of lots of people repeating the same claim to singularity seemed interesting.’ Read and watch a clip on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

‘They say that statues like this originally had paint applied to them. I believe it; but the mind reels at the thought of what the painter could have been called on to do.’ T.J. Clark views a kouros at the Met. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘For Sinclair and the more clubbable Lippmann, “mankind will not consent to be lied to indefinitely,” while for others in the period, T.S. Eliot for instance, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”’ Andrew O’Hagan on Walter Lippmann’s commitment to facts. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘State violence has been sanctified. Netanyahu has saved his soul, absolving himself of sin. “The government of guilt” walks free.’ Jacqueline Rose on interviewing Benjamin Netanyahu. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...