LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

DECEMBER 12. 2025

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. ..

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. ..

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. ..

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. ..

Deborah Friedell: Lifted Up

Pepys was a meticulous – some might say compulsive – record-keeper. Into his diary’s pages went social debts (who. ..

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. ..

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. ..

Jeremy Harding: Something Shameful

To read The Palestinians nearly half a century later is to recognise that the many defeats the Palestinian population. ..

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. ..

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. ..

Nick Richardson: Puffing on the Coals

Chemical reactions reflect human dramas, which reflect celestial movements, which reflect the mind of the divine. The. ..

James Butler: Short Cuts

Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. ..

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. ..