‘Malthus was a thoroughly imperial thinker.’ Oliver Cussen discusses Malthus’s theory of population growth, and its insidious effects on theorists and administrators alike from the early 19th century to the present day: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up...
‘In the main Owen directed his scorn not at his army superiors but at the civilians back home who remained so blithely indifferent to the suffering being endured by those they’d cheerily waved off to war.’ Mark Ford on Wilfred Owen’s letters home: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
It becomes apparent from Owen’s graphic and appalled letters home that it was the urge to make his mother, in the...
‘Gender fluidity was well recognised, and though many writers deplored it, some were proud to claim identities that would now be called non-binary.’ Barbara Newman on gender non-conformity in Byzantine devotional culture: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Gender fluidity was well recognised in Byzantium, and though many writers deplored it, some were proud to claim...
‘Many a confused male commentator of the later 19th century waxed eloquent about the dangers these palaces of commerce posed to female virtue, to home life and home economy.’ Rosemary Hill on the rise and fall of the department store: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
The department store is dying. It’s not the only building type to find itself marooned by social and economic change,...
‘To insist that these trials are not political fails to acknowledge why they were necessary in the first place.’ Linda Kinstler on the trials of the 6 January rioters, whom Trump has promised to pardon if elected: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
The goal of the government’s investigation has been to disaggregate the assemblage that attacked the Capitol into its...
‘Her gifts are clear: writing realistic dialogue and creating believable characters; narrative economy and instinctive pacing; capturing the way we live as it moves and changes.’ Joanna Biggs on Sally Rooney: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
At the end of each of Rooney’s novels, love triumphs partly because it might be the only form of solidarity, the only...
‘The central problem remained: Hamas is willing to exchange the remaining hostages for a ceasefire; Israel isn’t.’ @tomstevenson.bsky.socialwww.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
The delegations negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza have met more than a dozen times, though it’s hard to point to...
‘In terms of number of lines alone, this is the most substantial discovery of Euripides in half a century.’ Robert Cioffi on a newly excavated papyrus: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
The Euripides papyrus was uncovered using basic archaeological tools – a trowel, a brush and an instinct for reading...
‘His is a voice coming to us from a vanished world. “Annihilated” might be more accurate. Yet the voice breaks through to the present.’ T.J. Clark on Frantz Fanon, from our latest issue: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Fanon’s world has a logic. His pages are full of identities, contradictions, Aufhebungen – master and slave, being...
‘He owed his escape from the groove of the big studios to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.’ In the new issue, David Bromwich reviews a new biography of Stanley Kubrick: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Kubrick always means it. The focus never really pulls away; there is a substance, a purpose, a weightiness in the...