LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

JANUARY 23. 2026

Rosemary Hill: One of the Worst Things

It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica, one of Deborah Devonshire’s older. ..

Thomas Nagel: Now and Then

Our lives don’t just play out over time: we lead them over the course of that time, shaping them as an extended whole. ..

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi: Made in Tehran

Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state. ..

Jonathan Rée: We are all layabouts now

Alexandre Kojève described his book on Hegel as ‘very bad’, and he had a point. His take on the Phenomenology of. ..

Christopher Harding: Short Cuts

Assuming she remains prime minister after this month’s election, Takaichi Sanae will focus on the immediate economic. ..

Adam Shatz: Another Country

America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is. ..

JANUARY 9. 2026

Julian Bell: At the Musée Jacquemart-André

Georges de La Tour’s scan of the visual field is a stark, bold testing out of basic facets of experience. What is it. ..

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘I’m not a radical, Dad’

More than one variety of omniscience is on show in Saraswati. What is referred to as an omniscient narrator is usually. ..

Geoff Mann: Good Failures

Does anything matter if we’re done for? We are not the first to wonder. Contemporary fictions are preoccupied with. ..

Stephanie Burt: On Richard Siken

When Didion declared ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live, ’ she meant that we lie to ourselves all the time. ...

Chal Ravens: It’s. Not. Real.

Britney Spears was a basketball player, not a cheerleader; a self-professed tomboy; goofy rather than graceful. Her sex. ..

Anna McGee: At the Palazzo Strozzi

Faced with a parade of flushed Madonnas and anguished Christs, it would be easy to think that Fra Angelico was somehow. ..

David Runciman: Calling Dr Jekyll

Normally, being revealed as a hypocrite is kryptonite for a politician running for office. But Harris doesn’t know. ..

Michael Wood: At the Movies

Most of the characters in Marty Supreme believe their lives are a kind of movie, and when a character speaks of ‘. ..