One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as ...

Jefferson Hope’s condition seems similar to the one that threatens the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, ...

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been ...

In November 2022, archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Philadelphia, two hours south of Cairo, discovered a clump of papyri in a shallow grave. On one of them were written nearly a hundred ...

While normal life must compete with a whole ecosystem, a mirror bacterium might behave like the only real thing in ...

I dreamt of walking out of a landscape as if out of a painting – tipped from the picture by its tilting fields.

Children’s fiction has its own peculiar power: like a swordstick in an umbrella, it can flash sharp at unexpected moments. Taken seriously, it can work not just to educate but to transform and ...

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... Ghassan ...

The London Review of Books is the largest cultural, political and literary magazine in Europe and has an unparalleled international reputation for long form literary journalism. Published every two ...

The great auk was a flightless, populous and reportedly delicious bird, once found widely across the rocky outcrops of the North Atlantic. By the 1860s it was extinct, its decline sharpened by ...

In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, Captain Tom Moore decided to try to raise £1000 for the NHS by walking up and down ...

This week’s Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write ...