London Review of Books

Issue 48.19 is now online, featuring: @torilmoi.bsky.social on Fredric Jameson @geoffmann.bsky.social on prediction markets @deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Roy Cohn​ Iain Sinclair on J.H. Prynne Paul Keegan on Wayne Thiebaud and Aziz Huq on the US midterms. Read online now at www.lrb.co.uk

‘If we are to believe Fred, he remained faithful to Sartre his whole life. When he moves on to Marxism, he doesn’t abandon the insights into style, expression and consciousness developed in his first book.’ Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘On 22 October, the head of the Bakery Owners Association warned that the remaining bakeries in occupied Gaza would cease operations within 48 hours because of the lack of flour in the territory and Israeli entry restrictions.’ @selmadabbagh.bsky.social on Gaza. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘Nat Turner’s spiritual warfare was conducted on the terrain of Southampton County, and slavery shaped his strategic and moral imagination: his reckoning of the value of his own life and that of others.’ Walter Johnson on Turner’s slave revolt of August 1831. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Advanced technological tools give murder an air of scientific legitimacy. They allow the Israeli army to claim that it goes to great lengths to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to reduce the number of civilians killed.’ Eyal Weizman on 𝘕𝘈𝘡𝘈, online now www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘For decades, Chinese intellectuals have appropriated the work of foreign academics and journalists. The scope of what they could do with their borrowings was determined by their language skills. Now, AI has bridged that information gap.’ Mimi Jiang on the age of AI. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I still regard Clive James review of Judith Krantz' novel "Princess Daisy" as the gold standard of hatchet jobs : www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v0...

‘Emma Cline’s novel hums with luxury: the private plane, the voguish hotels and restaurants, the limousine. And yet those pristine spaces end up merging seamlessly with the institutional nihility of the euthanasia clinic.’ Ange Mlinko reads 𝘚𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘻𝘺. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘With seventy thousand Palestinians designated as military targets and default collateral damage set at twenty civilians for every low-level operative, “in this way you could kill the entirety of Gaza.”’ Eyal Weizman on 𝘕𝘈𝘡𝘈, online early from our next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The human rights organisation al-Haq issued a call yesterday for urgent action, calling on third states to intervene to “stop Israel’s mass starvation and intensified genocidal attacks on Gaza.” Hospitals have run out of crucial supplies.’ @selmadabbagh.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘It is unusual to see this level of unrest so close to elections. Very few of these young people – not even Benoît, who already sounds like a party leader – will be able to vote.’ Daniella @shreir.bsky.social on the protests in France, online now from the next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On the podcast: in an extract from our Close Readings subscription series, Tom McCarthy and @moonjets.bsky.social discuss James Joyce’s 𝘜𝘭𝘺𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 as both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

"The system that begins with a phone number being put into a computer system ends with an entire family crushed under the rubble." Eyal Weizman on NAZA in @lrb.co.uk:

‘If racial prejudice emerged only at a particular moment rather than being an abiding feature of human societies, then it’s a product of history – enduring, but not ineluctable.’ Alexander Bevilacqua on slavery’s intellectual origins. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Roy Cohn was nearly always under investigation for something – bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, one or another species of financial mismanagement. Whenever indictments came down he’d hold a press conference.’ @deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Trump’s lawyer. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Questions around corruption and democracy don’t only concern young people, but in Serbia it was students who led the way.’ @vincentbevins.bsky.social on Serbia’s student movement, from March. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘There are currently almost 25,000 specialist riot police in France, including 11,000 full-time Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité officers. It has often been argued, with good reason, that their mere presence incites trouble.’ Nabila Ramdani on the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

LRB reporting better than the entirety of the German press

‘Calculations of how much the lives of the colonised are worth have always been part of colonialism. The origins of the calculations that 𝘕𝘈𝘡𝘈 deals with go back to late 2000.’ Eyal Weizman on Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s film, online early from the next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The same Israeli officials who declared that there were no innocents in Gaza are now outraged by a film showing that this is exactly the principle the military has acted on.’ New: Eyal Weizman on 𝘕𝘈𝘡𝘈, from our next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘These were the first national demonstrations in which many lycéens had taken part, but they knew what to expect, having grown up with images of protests and police violence.’ Daniella @shreir.bsky.social on the protests in France, online early from the next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘More than two years after we were first driven out of Rafah we were still living in the camp, still reliant on the trucks for water.’ Hassan Ayman Herzallah waits for water in Gaza, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘Universities are cutting humanities courses to make room for new AI departments. But won’t we need more literature, history and philosophy to pass the time meaningfully after AI takes over?’ Mimi Jiang imagines a day in the age of AI. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘It is Shelagh Delaney’s imagination that now seems striking. 𝘈 𝘛𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘏𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 showed ways of living thought by some to be shocking and others merely to be bleak. No nuclear families or stable housing arrangements.’ Susannah Clapp on the playwright. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

On Thursday, two days on from Israel’s legislative elections, @adamshatz.bsky.social will discuss US-Israel relations with Nadia Abu El-Haj, Robert Malley and Ian Lustick at the New School, NYC. Tickets here: www.tickettailor.com/events/londo...

‘Looking back, I realise that very few people have shaped my life, have affected its material and structural foundations, as profoundly for the good as Fred Jameson.’ @torilmoi.bsky.social on Fredric Jameson: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Seneca lived in a society in which it was possible for the enslaver to become enslaved. Such a transformation was harder to imagine in Europe or North America during the 15th to 19th centuries.’ Alexander Bevilacqua on slavery’s intellectual origins. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘One of Ralph Ellison’s oddest rhetorical manoeuvres was to emphasise resilience while at the same time minimising adversity. There was so much silver lining in his account of African American history that the cloud is barely visible.’ Leo Robson on Ralph Ellison: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘As more and more web pages are written by AI, the internet becomes a less useful source of material for training LLMs: if you want a new and improved chatbot, there’s no use training it on its predecessors’ slop.’ Alfred Nunney on AI v. publishing, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘In other lycées, the most neglected of which are in the Paris suburbs, students have reported rats, cockroaches, leaking roofs, broken windows, no heating in winter, unusable toilets and missing toilet doors.’ Daniella Shreir on the protests in France, online early. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘My mind was no longer on the tasks in front of me but thinking about the next morning. When should I wake up? Would I arrive before the water ran out? Would I be able to carry enough for my family?’ Hassan Ayman Herzallah in Gaza, new on the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘Roy Cohn liked to insist he’d never had a childhood. He’d had to help his less brilliant father, a judge on the New York Supreme Court, with his cases; “before I was ten I had a dramatic impact on his thinking.”’ @deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Trump’s first lawyer. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘There are currently almost 25,000 specialist riot police in France, including 11,000 full-time Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité officers. It has often been argued, with good reason, that their mere presence incites trouble.’ Nabila Ramdani, on the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘What I see in Fred’s work is really back in the fifties, a young intellectual man with huge ambitions – but also the willingness and skill to do the hard work it took to say what he wanted to say.’ Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson, on the podcast. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

‘No effort is being made to conceal the medium, which is aggressively foregrounded. The textures suggest the processes of frosting and coating and glazing. We supply the rest. Wayne Thiebaud paints surfaces.’ Paul Keegan on the American painter’s sweet tooth. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘It is unusual to see this level of unrest so close to elections. Very few of these young people – not even Benoît, who already sounds like a party leader – will be able to vote.’ Daniella Shreir on the protests in France, online early from the next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Extraordinary @lrb.co.uk piece on prediction markets - just one place where the unbridled corruption of the #Trump administration is making fortunes for his cronies (and losing a lot of little people money)

‘It wouldn’t do to romanticise. Southbank could be cliquey, and outsiders or beginners could find the atmosphere created by regulars intimidating. It was a socially liminal place, occupied by socially liminal people.’ Francis Gooding on skating in London. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘We may have figured out that when Zola says “imagination” he means something more severe and simple: the systematic denial of reality.’ Reflections on Zola from Michael Wood: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Emma Cline’s novel hums with luxury: the private plane, the voguish hotels and restaurants, the limousine. And yet those pristine spaces end up merging seamlessly with the institutional nihility of the euthanasia clinic.’ Ange Mlinko reads 𝘚𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘻𝘺. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘David Hume saw the essay as a means of bringing learning out of a scholastic environment into the “conversible” world. Though most philosophers fillet his work, extracting the meat of his arguments, Hume’s literariness matters.’ Colin Kidd on the philosopher. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘For decades, Chinese intellectuals have appropriated the work of foreign academics and journalists. The scope of what they could do with their borrowings was determined by their language skills. Now, AI has bridged that information gap.’ Mimi Jiang on the age of AI. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘The Fifth Republic is a direct product of the Algerian War. The 1958 Constitution was specifically drafted to create a strongman head of state – in the first instance, Charles de Gaulle – whose primary task was to prevent a full-blown civil war.’ Nabila Ramdani: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘The law books in his office were just for show: they had belonged to his father and were out of date. But he knew that most problems could be solved with phone calls, and no one was better at those.’ @deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Trump’s first lawyer, Roy Cohn. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘At the first interval in the Berlin Staatsoper’s new production of 𝘓𝘢 𝘝𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘦, the man to my right turned to me and said: “Mein Gott, ist das dumm!”’ @oliviagiovetti.bsky.social on Spontini’s opera, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/oc...

‘These were the first national demonstrations in which many lycéens had taken part, but they knew what to expect, having grown up with images of protests and police violence.’ Daniella Shreir on the protests in France, online early from the next issue. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Homeland Security claimed that 15,903 aliens were registered to vote in Nevada. Pressed by the state administration to identify these people, Mullin’s staff produced a list of 185 names. Nevada’s election authorities demonstrated that all were US citizens.’ Aziz Huq: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘In​ the long history of mass racial killing in the United States, Nat Turner’s revolt stands out as the one instance in which the perpetrators were Black and the victims white.’ Walter Johnson on Nat Turner’s visions. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘John Clare excelled at logging birdsong: “eejip-eejip”, “cheer-up”, “chew-rit”, “grig-grig”, “tweet-tut”, “wet-my-foot”. Not for nothing was he known in London as “our Green Man”.’ Camille Ralphs on the ‘peasant poet’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...