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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Some Beneficial Influence

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Gazelle Mba

William Ansah Sessarakoo’s father, John Corrantee of Annamaboe, on the Gold Coast, was a member of the Fante ruling family and a prominent merchant, well known in the interior and among European slave traders. In order to strengthen ties with his European business partners, and to give his heirs an advantage over their countrymen, Corrantee sent one of his sons to be educated in France and another – Sessarakoo – in England. Sessarakoo was about eleven when he left Africa in 1747.
Who needs smoothies?

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Liam Shaw

The pain of toothache arrives long after the damage has been done. The process begins when bacteria in the mouth turn sugars from our food into acid, which etches the tooth’s enamel, allowing the bacteria to penetrate further. Only when they hit the nerve bundles at the tooth’s pulpy core does the sufferer become aware – all too painfully aware – of their predicament. Dental pain comes in pulsing waves, seemingly synchronised with every beat of the heart.
At the Whisky Bond

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Dani Garavelli

One afternoon last year I walked up a steep incline from Applecross Basin on the Forth and Clyde Canal, stopped under the second pylon I came to and looked out over the monochrome skyscape. I had been told that this was the spot where Duncan Thaw, the protagonist of Books One and Two of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, utters his most famous lines.
Behold the Pole Star

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

Several years ago at a party I met a man who claimed that he navigated London using a compass. Fed up of following directions on his phone, he had bought a handsome, waterproof instrument and fixed it to the handlebars of his bike. Before setting off he would check the address of his destination and take a bearing; then he would wend his way through street and alley. Doing this had, he claimed, reoriented him in a city made unfamiliar through use.
Every Bottle down the Drain

2 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Patrick Cockburn

In the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat at 90 Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington Station, to walk across Kensington Gardens to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. I wanted a visa to visit Iran, where the US raid to rescue staff held hostage in its embassy in Tehran had failed disastrously a few days earlier.
As the Met bruised in

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

Last Thursday evening, more than twenty Metropolitan police officers – some armed with tasers – broke down the doors of the Quaker meeting house in Westminster to arrest six young women. The women were attending a welcome meeting of Youth Demand, a small, non-violent activist group currently dedicated to action against climate change and the genocide in Gaza.
Kippers and Champagne

4 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Jane Martinson |Daniel Cohen

There are people who like the idea of living in a hotel, but nobody wants to die in one. Margaret Thatcher checked in to the Ritz in December 2012, a couple of weeks after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. ‘She loved the Ritz,’ her private secretary recalled. ‘She was looked after by beautifully dressed young men: the world wasn’t bothering her anymore.’ Thatcher spent the next three months in a suite that cost £3660 a night.
Swagger for Survival

4 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Abdulrazak Gurnah |Blake Morrison

The theft in Theft isn’t a theft at all. Badar, working as a servant boy in a house in Dar es Salaam in the 1990s, is accused of adding groceries to the household’s weekly bill and selling them to accomplices. Nothing about Badar suggests he’d be capable of such a crime, and Haji and Raya, his affable master and mistress (terms they reject: ‘What is this Bwana business? Call me Haji’), think the grocer must be cheating them.
Delete the workforce

4 weeks ago | lrb.co.uk | Kate Conger |Ryan Mac |Walter Isaacson |Deborah Friedell

Elon Musk bought Twitter because he loved it. He loved tweeting poop emojis at dawn; he loved tweeting masturbation jokes at dusk. He loved that he had more Twitter followers than almost anyone else, though it galled that Barack Obama and Justin Bieber had more. While other celebrity social media accounts were often so sanitised that they smelled of chlorine – ‘Happy Tuesday everybody! Stay positive!’ – at least no one could claim that @elonmusk had ever been focus-grouped.
Adam Shatz | Submission

1 month ago | lrb.co.uk | Adam Shatz

On Friday, 21 March – two weeks after the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student from a refugee camp in Syria; a week after Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian graduate student, fled to Canada to avoid being detained by ICE; and just a few days after Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas, killing more than four hundred Palestinians in less than 24 hours – Columbia University capitulated to the Trump administration’s menu of demands, including a ban on the wearing of non-medical masks on...