Tag Archives: London Review of Books

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – MARCH 19, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Nicholas Spice – Schubert’s Imagination; Daniella Shreir on Chantal Akerman; Tom Stevenson – Death of an Ayatollah; Joanna Biggs – Solvej Balle’s Time Loop….

Iran, Week One

The attack launched on Iran by the US and Israel on 28 February was a textbook case of international aggression, justified in only the most cursory fashion by fictional Iranian threats and undertaken with no clear aims and no clear demands or terms. In announcing the war Donald Trump described it as a wholesale attack on both government and state. The US and Israel would ‘raze their missile industry to the ground’ and ‘annihilate their navy’. Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to ‘come out to the streets and finish the job’. By Tom Stevenson

Mummy’s Favourite

 The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, argu­ably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their act­ions. By Andrew O’Hagan

Marlowe’s Betrayals

As Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance shows despite itself, it is not Marlowe’s life story that we still need, but his plays and poems: we might well want to avert our eyes from the bathetically dismal life of the man who wrote them. By Michael Dobson

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie

Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

Andrew O’Hagan

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – MARCH 5, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Jackson Lears – Brzezinski’s Cold War; Marlowe’s Betrayals; Alexander Bevilacqua visits Noah’s Ark; Caravaggio’s Clothes and more.

Lee Gillette, Neil Blackshaw, Ed Jesudason, Samuel Freeman, David Foglesong, Jim Holt, Michael Neill, Malcolm Parry

James Butler‘Need a lord on the board?’

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – FEBRUARY 19, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Seamus Perry: Pluralism and Poetry; James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered; James Meek on Romania’s Far Right;

Seamus Perry · Pluralism and the Modern Poet: Pluralism and Poetry

‘Art arises,’ Auden writes, ‘out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical.’ We want things two ways, which analysis says we cannot have; but for a moment a poem lets us, in a way that discursive prose, for instance, cannot.

Jonathan RéeKojève v. Hegel

Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on The Phenomenology of Spirit is not only misleading but slapdash, dogmatic, frivolous and flamboyant. The characters he filled it with, from the Master and Slave to the Sensualist and the Sage, sound rather like Mr Worldly Wiseman, Madam Bubble and Mr Sagacity in Pilgrim’s Progress.

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – FEBRUARY 5, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Visions of America’

Made in Tehran

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi

Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History  by Vali Nasr.

No King

Daisy Hay

Friends until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution by James Grant.


One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment by Samuel Scheffler


El Cid: 
The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary by Nora Berend



LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – JANUARY 22, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features…

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping by Joseph Torigian

The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China by Michael Sheridan

On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd

Short Cuts: On Venezuela

Cicero: The Man and His Works by Andrew R. Dyck


Buckley: 
The Life and the Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – DECEMBER 25, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Will the AI Bubble burst?’


Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography 
by Tom Arnold-Forster


The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip 
by Stephen Witt

The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim

Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination by Karen Hao

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race that Will Change the World by Parmy Olson


Alchemy: 
An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments and the Birth of Modern Science by Philip Ball

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – DECEMBER 4, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Robert Frost’s ugly feelings’….

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry by Adam Plunkett

Short Cuts: A Bridge across the Humber

Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin by Kevin J. HayesIngenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist by Richard Munson

A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America by Susan Juster

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – NOVEMBER 20, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Will We Still Google It?’; Syntax of Slavery and Habsburg Legacies…

Will we still google it?

I’m starting to feel some pre-emptive nostalgia when I do a Google search. Yes, it’s true, search can sometimes take you to places you don’t want to go. But at least a ‘classical’ search engine like Google in the 2000s and 2010s took you outside itself, and perhaps implicitly prompted you to evaluate critically what you found there. by Donald MacKenzie

Syntax of Slavery

Slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was taken for granted until the growth of abolitionism in the later 18th century. Liverpool could hardly be an exception when the slave trade was so embedded in its economy.  By John Kerrigan

Habsburg Legacies

We still live in the long shadow of Habsburg disintegration. In addition to the lingering legacy of 19th-century state formations, European and global politics are shaken by continuing reverberations in states that have disappeared from Europe since 1990: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the GDR and, above all, the Soviet Union. By Holly Case

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 23, 2025 PREVIEW

London Review of Books

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features ‘Mrs. Dalloway’s Demons

Unconditional Looking

The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ 
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9

‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel 
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3

Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2

Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3

Ouvriers de luxe

Gustave Flaubert et Michel Lévy: Un couple explosif 
by Yvan Leclerc and Jean-Yves Mollier.
Le Livre de Poche, 224 pp., €8.40, November 2024, 978 2 253 94112 5

Fish in the Wrong Place

Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World 
by Corey Ross.
Princeton, 447 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 691 21144 2

In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 220 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 27849 1

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 9, 2025 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Pico in Purgatory; Can cellos remember?; Britain’s Europe Problem

Pico in Purgatory

Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think of the Renaissance this way partly because of a centuries-long misreading of it. In which case, does Pico really belong to the Renaissance? Or is our whole idea of the Renaissance hopelessly flimsy, nothing but a collection of fantasies about what it means to be modern and human?

Britain’s Europe Problem

From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They were all mistaken. 

Computers that want things

For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember that existing iterations of AI can’t care. The chatbot doesn’t not care like a human not caring: it doesn’t care like a rock doesn’t care, or a glass of water. AI doesn’t want anything. But this is bound to change.