Zeitschrift
London Review of Books
Website: https://www.lrb.co.uk/
Erscheint: 24 issues/year
The London Review of Books is Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from art and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy, not to mention fiction and poetry. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.
As well as book reviews, memoir and reportage, each issue also contains poems, reviews of exhibitions and movies, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to every piece we’ve ever published in our digital archive. Our new website also features a regular blog, an online store, podcasts and short documentaries, plus video highlights from our events programmes on both sides of the Atlantic, and at the London Review Bookshop.
The London Review of Books was founded in 1979, during the year-long management lock-out at the Times. In June that year, Frank Kermode wrote a piece in the Observer suggesting that a new magazine fill the space left by the temporary absence of the Times Literary Supplement. The first issue of the LRB, edited by Karl Miller, appeared four months later. It included pieces by Miller and Kermode, as well as John Bayley on William Golding and William Empson on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and poems by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Edited by Mary-Kay Wilmers from 1992 to 2021, the LRB now has the largest circulation of any magazine of its kind in Europe (2020 ABC: 88,421). Jean McNicol and Alice Spawls were appointed editors in February 2021. In 2019, our neighbours Faber published London Review of Books: An Incomplete History to mark our 40th anniversary – be sure to buy a copy from the LRB Store.
Ausgaben
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 13
Arif Ahmed, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, has been appointed the UK’s first ‘free speech tsar’. The position – Ahmed’s official title will be director for freedom of speech and academic freedom – is a creation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 12
In April 1973, on a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet from London to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 11
On a Berlin street corner, just off Friedrichstrasse, there is a faded bronze plaque set into the wall. ‘Here on 18 March 1848, barricade fighters defended themselves against the troops of the Second Royal Regiment of Prussia who, hours later, refused orders to resume the attack.’ Then come three lines of verse: ‘Es…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 10
‘My only country/is six feet high,’ Norman MacCaig wrote in 1973; ‘and whether I love it or not/I’ll die/for its independence.’ This sort of muscular individualism, teetering on the edge of satire, is now unfashionable in MacCaig’s country. Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal.…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 9
Pensions – and ‘the fiscal impact of ageing’ – have long troubled the EU. A European Commission paper published in 2016 noted with relief that ‘most EU member states’ were reforming their pension systems. France is one of them. During his first term in office Emmanuel Macron envisaged an ambitious reform plan, but…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 8
Alice Spawls writes about the diminution and degradation of NHS services ( LRB , 30 March ). As a GP I meet patients almost daily who have been obliged to seek private treatment. They are often rueful about the cost, and say that they’d rather pay a little more in tax than spend tens of thousands of pounds of savings.…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 7
Genealogy – the records of descent, the pedigrees of mortals and gods, of genos , race, kind and offspring – is one of the great feats of the human imagination: a vast collection of stories, both intimate and cosmic, that bind the living to the dead and to one another, the past to the present and the present to what…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 6
Rosemary Hill discusses John Smeaton’s ingenious design for the reconstructed Eddystone lighthouse ( LRB , 16 February ). She doesn’t mention that in order to anchor the lighthouse securely at the base, Smeaton sliced off a fair chunk from the top of the House Rock on which it stands. This gave rise to a curious…
Ausgabe | Zeitschrift
London Review of Books 45 (2023), 5
When I deleted my Twitter account in September last year, provoked not by Elon Musk’s imminent takeover but by the suffocating quantity of royal coverage gushing from every media source, I was left feeling bereft, as any addict is when their drug is taken away. How was I supposed to react to the news now? And if I had…