LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

JULY 2. 2025

Kevin Okoth: The Pessimist’s Optimist

Achille Mbembe is the pessimist’s optimist: he delivers a devastating analysis of the contemporary moment while never. ..

Jonathan Healey: Blood and Confusion

The English republic isn’t recalled with much fondness by anyone. It is known as a fun-sapping entity that cancelled. ..

Andy Beckett: An Efficient Man

Now that the war is so long ago, the subject of Nazi exiles in South America can seem a stale, even dubious. ..

Tareq Baconi: Short Cuts

Humanitarian aid has long served as cover for Israeli crimes. Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying force is. ..

Patricia Lockwood: Arrayed in Shining Scales

I was under no illusion that The Collected Prose would solve the mystery, or lay to rest the lie, of how Plath was. ..

JUNE 13. 2025

Gazelle Mba: At White Cube

Metal was the material of the age, and Richard Hunt animated it. Now his sculptures speak not to the possibilities and. ..

Edmund Gordon: No Pork Salad

Professional tennis requires extraordinary psychological capacities – obsessive focus, epic self-belief – so it. ..

William Davies: TV Meets Fruit Machine

In my own For You journey into Faragism, I was struck by the recurring assumption that the ultimate prize was exit of. ..

Niela Orr: Sinnermen

Ryan Coogler’s​ horror movie Sinners was conceived and filmed before Trump’s re-election, but part of its premise. ..

Andrew O’Hagan: Air-Conditioned Unease

We can feel imprisoned by other people’s versions of who we are, especially if their urge is to blame. On one hand, ...

Martyn Rady: Fox-Tosser

It would be tempting to repeat the salacious stories told about Augustus the Strong, but Tim Blanning has instead. ..

Tom Stevenson: Short Cuts

The standard assessment of the British armed forces is that they have become ‘hollowed out’. The army has too few. ..

Steven Shapin: Through the Trapdoor

Stephen Hawking may have been a genius, but ‘Roger Penrose’s insights seem to stem from some superhuman life-form. ..

Peter Talbot: Diary

In aerospace, engineering, technology, construction, health and defence, the rush is on to grab as many fat contracts as. ..