Amia Srinivasan: The Impossible Patient
What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of...
London Review of Books
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Jacqueline Rose: When the Messiah Comes
Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to...
Bee Wilson: Two Pins and a Lollipop
To be a Garland fan is to have the illusion that you can save her from the wounds of the world, even as her voice and her eyes and her gloriously melodic laugh seem instead to be saving you.
Andrew O’Hagan: Fatal Realism
Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book Public Opinion, published in 1922. The book posits that modern man responds not to...
Anne Carson: Lieu Vague
1breakfast is ready Dadhappy birthday to you it’s not my birthdayyou better get a move on sit down Dadwho’s been using my razor you don’t have a razorwhy don’t you just...
John Lanchester: King of Cannibal Island
Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in circular patterns, propping up turnover and valuations. Colossal amounts of...
James Butler: Short Cuts
Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the...
Nick Richardson: Puffing on the Coals
Chemical reactions reflect human dramas, which reflect celestial movements, which reflect the mind of the divine. The alchemist’s lab work and the philosophy were inextricable: working with material...
Michael Wood: Spellbound Gloaming
Gaston Bachelard is inviting us to go beyond what we think we know. That is, how to counter boring intuitions with interesting ones. But who is to say which is which? I suppose the answer depends on...
T.J. Clark: A Kouros at the Met
It is one of the wonders of the world. You round a corner from the Met’s entrance hall and see the sculpture deep in a room to come, framed in a tall narrow door. Light hits the sculpture from the...
Jeremy Harding: Something Shameful
To read The Palestinians nearly half a century later is to recognise that the many defeats the Palestinian population had already endured, along with those of their unreliable Arab friends in three...
Helen Pfeifer: Turn around and run
The life of the tenth Ottoman sultan, Suleyman, known in Europe as the Magnificent and in Turkey as the Lawgiver, has the trappings of a Greek tragedy or a soap opera. There is murder, sex, duplicity...
Alice Hunt: Out of Rehab
Above all, Jackson presents James as a ‘king of words’. No king before or since has written so thoughtfully about the nature of kingship. His ‘manual on kingcraft’, Basilikon Doron (‘The King’s...
Deborah Friedell: Lifted Up
Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper. Into his diary’s pages went social debts (who had given him dinner, who still owed him one), gossip, the music he heard and the...
Susannah Clapp: Not Quite Music
For Rimsky-Korsakov, the key of A was clear pink; for Scriabin, it was green. Duke Ellington read the flight patterns of birds as musical phrases and saw the D notes of his baritone saxophonist,...
Ange Mlinko: Scattered Alphabet
Reading the work that Susan Howe has produced over the past half century, one marvels at the consistency and depth of her inquiry. If much of her writing sounds like the apotheosis of Eliotic...
Daniel Soar: Land of Milk and Cheese
The universe has no centre. What Pynchon has mapped is a world that is continuous and connected, where borders, however securitised, are porous. Drop a pin on the map, anywhere on the map, and that’s...
Clare Bucknell: At the Museo Byron
What must it have been like to live cheek by jowl with the man you’d cuckolded? In the early 19th century, for a woman’s cavalier servente to occupy the same household as her husband was not...
Jo Applin: Diary
In September, a suitcase filled with sculptural odds and ends was discovered beneath a spiral staircase in Louise Bourgeois’s house in Chelsea, New York. It had been tucked away behind a rail of...
Letters
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 23 (Friday 12 December 2025)
Table of contents
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 23 (Friday 12 December 2025)