LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

JANUARY 9. 2026

Tony Wood: On Venezuela

The choice of narco-trafficking as the pretext is partly motivated by a desire to skirt even the feeble murmurs that. ..

Rachel Armitage: Diary

Many brass bands were started by factory owners in the belief that music would give their workers purpose, strengthen. ..

Natasha Fedorson: Men are like road signs

‘Who’s afraid of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya? ’ was the title of an essay that appeared in a Russian émigré literary. ..

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 ‘. ..

Thomas Meaney: I’d smash you in the face

Anti-communist​ dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-. ..

Colm Tóibín: Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941

Who​ was English; who was American? If Auden was English, was T. S. Eliot American? Or was it the other way around? ...

Chris Given-Wilson: All the flowers shall bow

Given that the most widely accepted date for the start of the Wars of the Roses is 1455, it is unsurprising that the. ..