At first glance, the row of booths could be mistaken for a chorus line dressing room. There are eight in all; each ...

The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of ...

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’.

In 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit ...

Starmer’s strategy of modest progress and alliance-building could be scuppered by the fiscal hawks in his ...

In Mali, a country currently ruled by a cohort of pro-Russian army officers, the only way a journalist can stay alive or avoid a prison sentence is by practising ‘sunshine journalism’: praising the ...

Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the ...

Some time in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where ...

Daniel Defoe , in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains. Arriving at the circle of nineteen standing stones at Boscawen-Un in Cornwall, ...

Ionce witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered ...

Many TV shows are set in hospitals, but fewer novels, at least ones that take place outside the psychiatric ward. Hospitals make for good drama: the path to diagnosis is a mystery plot with inherent ...

Wynne Godley was by turns a professional oboist, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an economist at the Treasury and a director of the Royal Opera House. Yet at thirty he found himself ‘living ...