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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Articles

Terrence Malick melts away

1 day ago | lrb.co.uk | David Thomson

Terrence Malick is the quietest of American movie directors. He gives no interviews; he avoids talkshows and festival appearances; he doesn’t feed us stories of what he was doing and why. For decades, he has done his best to avoid being photographed. He isn’t a ‘known American’ or a spokesman for himself in the way of Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino, Spike Lee or just about any other director.
Is Hayek to blame?

1 day ago | lrb.co.uk | David Runciman

The Mont Pelerin Society was set up in 1947 with the aim of ensuring that the apparent triumph of freedom over fascism in the Second World War should instead be understood as a defeat. Inspired by its founding father, Friedrich von Hayek, whose rallying call The Road to Serfdom had been published three years earlier, the organisation believed that the price of victory had been too high.
Remembering Hugh Roberts

4 days ago | lrb.co.uk | Adam Shatz

Hugh Roberts has died from cancer at the age of 76. Among his books were a collection of penetrating articles on Algerian politics, The Battlefield; a meticulous historical study of Kabyle society, Berber Government; and a monograph on the Arab Spring, based on pieces he’d published in the LRB. To read Hugh’s writing – whether in his books, his articles or the analyses he wrote for the International Crisis Group – is to encounter a thinker of unusual rigour, seriousness and daring.
Tom Stevenson | Condo Diplomacy

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

The Trump court is a royal progress that moves between Palm Beach and the White House, for the most part in private planes. But the interests of the US government require that at least some of its members be willing to travel farther afield than Florida. Trump talks of putting the US economy behind a great tariff wall, but he also wants deals, which means he needs dealers. America’s official chief diplomat is the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, but so far his activities have been fairly limited.
Olivia Giovetti | In Salzburg

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Olivia Giovetti

Ain Anger as Dosifei and members of the Slovak Philharmonic Choir as Old Believers in Simon McBurney’s production of Mussorgsky’s ‘Khovanshchina’, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, at the Salzburg Easter Festival in April 2025. Photo © Inés BacherThe version of Khovanshchina that Mussorgsky left behind when he died was as messy as the history it depicts. He began working on the opera in 1872, the bicentennial of Peter the Great’s birth.
James Butler · Short Cuts: On Pope Francis

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | James Butler

Francis assumed the papacy in 2013 in the teeth of a crisis. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, the first pope in centuries to resign, was strongly associated with theological and ritual conservatism. His resignation was widely interpreted as an admission of defeat by proliferating sexual abuse scandals, which had shattered the moral authority of the priesthood, even among many of the faithful. Catholicism in the eyes of the world was defined by abuse, paedophilia and cover-up.
Unfortunate Ecgfrith

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Tom Shippey

THE MERCIAN CHRONICLES completes a trilogy by Max Adams that began with The King in the North, centred on King Oswald of Northumbria (r. 634-42), and went on to Ælfred’s Britain, about King Ælfred of Wessex (r. 871-99). Its focus is King Offa (r. 757-96) and thus it helps to fill the chronological gap. There is, however, a major difference between this and the earlier volumes. Adams’s title is deliberately ironic.
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

In 1981, in the wake of a budget that slashed government spending amid a steep economic downturn, 364 academic economists signed a letter to the Times.
Michael Ledger-Lomas

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Michael Ledger-Lomas

Dante Gabriel Rossetti could always cheer himself up by belittling William Morris. At the top of a letter to Jane Morris in 1868, he scribbled a crest for ‘The Bard and Petty Tradesman’ in which Morris, plucking a lyre beneath a laurel tree, is back-to-back with his double, who is leaning over his shop counter. Sending up Morris as a hypocrite, intoning odes when he wasn’t flogging knick-knacks, was part of Rossetti’s campaign to seduce Jane.
Renters v. Rentiers

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Jack Shenker

How does anyone make sense of Britain’s rental crisis? Let’s start with Ruby’s story – and that of her landlord, which is inseparable from her own though they’ve never met. Ruby was born in Kent, where her mother had been sent to live as a teenager while under the care of a local authority in London, ‘a forgotten girl’, as Ruby called her, ‘shifted out to wherever was cheap’.