LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

JUNE 13. 2025

Helen Pfeifer: In Velvet-Lined Rooms

Gulbadan Begum was the daughter of the founder of the Mughal Empire. She is the only Mughal woman known to have written. ..

Jenny Turner: Something Is Surviving

Mushrooms, ​ trees, turf, twigs, bushes, moss-covered stones: nature is a force in Olga Tokarczuk’s Empusium, ...

Christian Lorentzen: Mayor of New York

The landlords own the city, and they rent its mayors. Bill de Blasio, who accomplished three rent freezes during his. ..

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. ..

Edmund Gordon: No Pork Salad

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

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. ..

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. ..

Tom Stevenson: Short Cuts

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

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, ...

MAY 23. 2025

Lili Owen Rowlands: Diary

There are no rules about what constitutes a crisis. Calls can be about an assault that took place days earlier or an. ..

Daniel Trilling: Is this fascism?

As the historian Ian Kershaw says, trying to define fascism is ‘like trying to nail jelly to a wall’, yet for all. ..

Ed Kiely: Short Cuts

Universities’ reliance on international students is only the most recent attempt to solve a broader problem, one that. ..

Susan Pedersen: Ownership Struggle

The great majority of the 350,000 ‘Soviet’ displaced persons were ‘Soviet’ in Soviet eyes but often not in. ..

Neal Ascherson: Hotsdoogs

‘Norman Lewis​ wrote about himself that “travel came before writing. There was a time when I felt that all I. ..