London Review of Books

The London Review of Books (LRB) is a UK-based publication that features literary essays. It comes out every two weeks.

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Operation Rising Lion

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

Israel’s aerial assault on Iran, launched on 13 June, was a straightforward act of aggression that extends the sequence of violence begun in Gaza and continued in Lebanon, Syria and beyond. Whether the attack was green-lit by the United States, or more likely ‘yellow-lit’, is still unclear. But it hardly matters, since the US quickly moved to support and abet the attack.
Peter Talbot · Diary: Gulf Contracts

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Peter Talbot

The week before I went to the Middle East, the company held a Global Town Hall. ‘Town Hall’ is the faux-folksy term used by modern multinationals for meetings at which senior management transmit information to the workforce. The presentation is delivered to a small live audience and simultaneously broadcast to thousands of others.
Niela Orr · Sinnermen

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Niela Orr

Ryan Coogler’s horror movie Sinners is (so far) the pop cultural sensation of the second Trump administration. Elijah and Elias Moore, aka Smoke and Stack, twin brothers played by an alternately caddish and cantankerous Michael B. Jordan, return home to Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta in 1932. Smoke and Stack aren’t content to take on a sharecropper’s plot, but want to be entrepreneurial New Negroes.
TV Meets Fruit Machine

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | William Davies

In the mid-2010s, the Chinese technology company ByteDance studied the leading video clip-sharing platforms, such as Vine and Musical.ly, and identified some crucial weaknesses. The clips were not well formatted for what had become the world’s most popular interface, the vertical smartphone screen. And while the existing platforms were well designed for watching and sharing videos, they were less user-friendly when it came to creating and editing them.
Gazelle Mba · At White Cube: On Richard Hunt

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Gazelle Mba

The sculptor Richard Hunt was nineteen years old when he looked into Emmett Till’s casket. It was September 1955. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had called on mourners to witness and grieve for her son and, over three days, thousands of people filed past Till’s body at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, a short walk from the Hunt family home.
Paul Farley · Poem: ‘A Rewilding’

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Paul Farley

Masonic creature. Maker. Water encircledsurvivor of hat crazes. Crib fabricator. Chiseller. Tooth enamel’s hardest expressionon any branch of the mammal clade. Stash housebuilder. Stickler. Worker in wands and twigs,in waterproof slick fur. Dammer of the catchmentunder winter constellations that burn and flickerwhen dark and frost resume the Northern hemisphere. Your ice creche. Your infinity pool of the woods. Your gnawing that forks panic through the sap. Your assault on the vertical.
Tom Stevenson · Short Cuts: Ready for War?

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Tom Stevenson

On 2 June the British government finally published its Strategic Defence Review on the state of the UK armed forces. When it was commissioned, in July 2024, Keir Starmer described it as ‘first of its kind’ and ‘root and branch’ – a clear indication that it would be nothing of the sort. This was the fourth defence review in the past five years, with two more (to do with reserve forces and defence industry matters) still in progress.
‘Bang! I was out’

1 week ago | lrb.co.uk | Dani Garavelli

On a sunny afternoon last month Ryan arrived at the Thistle, a one-storey pebbledash building in the east end of Glasgow. The Thistle is the UK’s first Safer Drug Consumption Facility (SDCF). Ryan is a regular there.
Marie Nejar 1930-2025

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Eric Otieno Sumba

Marie Nejar died last month at the age of 95. As far as the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (ISD) is aware, she was the last Black survivor of Nazi Germany. As she writes in her 2007 autobiography – whose German title, Mach nicht so traurige Augen weil du ein Negerlein bist (‘Don’t make such sad eyes because you are a little n*****’), is an indictment of German publishing then and now – Nejar was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr in 1930.
How to Beat Ebola

4 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Edna Bonhomme

Ebola is a frightening disease. It spreads from person to person through contact with bodily fluids, and symptoms include vomiting, diarrhoea and bleeding. It has an average fatality rate of 50 per cent if left untreated. (Covid-19 has a crude fatality rate of 2.7 per cent.)First detected in 1976 in a village near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then known as Zaire), the disease is believed to have a zoonotic origin (probably fruit bats).