LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

MAY 23. 2025

Jeremy Harding: Paths to Restitution

The Royal Museum of the Belgian Congo became the Royal Museum of Central Africa after Brussels choked back its fury and. ..

David Todd: Most Handsome and Best

How can we account for France’s historical wavering on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and. ..

Laleh Khalili: Collective Property, Private Control

In 2022 Pfizer received $16.7 billion to provide Covid vaccines for US forces. But the rest goes to the development of. ..

Hal Foster: Pinstriped Tycoon

To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the. ..

Dinah Birch: Cosy as a Scalpel

Why do I not object to having my imagination regularly assaulted with the grisly details of murder? Is it a kind of. ..

Joanna Biggs: Beneath the White Scarf

Twenty years of writing, reading, thinking and travelling went into Memoirs of Hadrian. Several drafts were burned. But. ..

Erin Maglaque: At the National Gallery

Sienese painters adopted forms so distinct from those of their better-known Florentine neighbours that their work was. ..

Diarmaid MacCulloch: With Fresh Eyes

All autobiography is inherently mendacious, if only by omission and with the intent of protecting the innocent. In his. ..

Jorie Graham: When the World Ended

everyone woke up. It was a gorgeous sunny day. The lists with our names on them were laid out in the light. Someone straightened the pile. Are they complete I heard a voice ask though it was. ..

Deborah Valenze: Widows Abound

In Social Topography of a Rural Community Steve Hindle describes the lives of 780 inhabitants of 176 households in the. ..

Chris Power: Postcards from the Past

Georgi Gospodinov​ was 22 when Bulgarian communism collapsed in early 1990. ‘The end of our training, ’ he has. ..

Letters

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 10

MAY 9. 2025

Jérôme Tubiana: Diary

In 2019, I made several visits to Dhar al-Jebel, a Libyan detention centre better known as Zintan, after the nearest. ..

Stephanie Burt: On Forrest Gander

Forrest Gander’s​ first collection of poems appeared in 1988. He grew up in Virginia and his early work seemed like. ..