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Your Guide to the Most Unique Things to Do in London

london review of books reputation

London sees the UK’s highest levels of tourism, boasting 21 million travelers yearly pre-pandemic . The city leans into its travel-savvy background, with sites like Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and Hyde Park drawing in countless international adventurers. However, many of London’s greatest tourist spots are found off the beaten path. These are some of the most unique places to visit in London.

1. Wind Your Way Through Neal’s Yard

Of all of London’s picturesque streets and markets, Neal’s Yard is one of the greatest gems. This tucked-away spot can be difficult to reach. It’s only accessible via two narrow passageways. Still, the trek is worth the payoff.

You’ll be greeted with some of London’s brightest buildings, colorful neon storefronts, unique shops, and friendly cafes. Those who run businesses at Neal’s Yard are largely focused on sustainability and environmentalism. You’ll find that many foods and products are vegan and nature-friendly.

2. Plummet Down the World’s Longest Slide at ArcelorMittal Orbit

london review of books reputation

ArcelorMittal Orbit is in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a short walk from Stratford Station. This stunning attraction will change your definition of “the scenic route.” The ArcelorMittal Orbit , a winding sculpture with a large viewing station at the top, was constructed by artist Anish Kapoor. At the peak, you can see miles of London’s skyline and engage with an interactive history of the city.

However, the most popular part of this sculpture might be one of its exits: the longest, highest slide in the world. Ride The Slide offers plenty of twists, turns, and laugh-inducing drops. It also includes transparent sections for incredible city views. Those who are afraid of heights might want to steer clear. 

3. Enter a Fantasy at Hoxton Street Monster Supplies

This creepy trinket shop will transport you to another dimension. Hoxton Street Monster Supplies sells all sorts of essentials for the “living, dead, and undead.” Some items include “salt made from tears of laughter,” “edible eyeballs,” and “cubed earwax.” Despite the frightening names, most of the goods are edible treats or quirky toys.

Behind this spooky concept is a pleasant goal: to support creative writers in the local community. The Ministry of Stories manages the business. This organization is focused on uplifting young storytellers and providing writing workshops to children.

4. Travel Back in Time at Dennis Severs’ House

london review of books reputation

If you want a twist on the classic historic house tour, look no further than Dennis Severs’ House on Folgate Street. In 1979, artist Dennis Severs bought the four-story home to serve as his primary residence. During his time there, he turned the location into a living set for tourists to enjoy. This fascinating atmosphere tells a fictitious story of a family called the Huguenots. The detail-rich room arrangements hint at why the Huguenots seem to have vanished from the property. We won’t spoil the big reveal, though!

5. Trek Through London’s Vacant Underground Tunnels

Like many large European cities, London has a huge public transit system. Despite the Tube’s packed schedule, some lines have gone dark, and their tunnels are no longer in operation. Many have become unsettling spots to explore in London’s underbelly.

The London Transport Museum organizes tours for interested parties to explore abandoned mail tubes, vintage tram routes, untouched shelter tunnels, and out-of-commission “ghost” stations. The abandoned tunnels will satisfy any traveler looking to scratch a history itch without spending a day in a museum.

6. Have a Picnic at Battersea Park

london review of books reputation

This lush green park in South West London spans over 200 acres of scenic land. Battersea Park , which was opened by Queen Victoria in 1858, is one of London’s more peaceful settings. Visitors who wander through can expect to find fountains, ponds, statues, and artifacts. There are plenty of places to have a picnic, read, or watch the clouds.

Active tourists can enjoy the park’s biking and running trails, sports fields, and more. Many travelers also like to trek across the massive Albert Bridge for photo ops. Check out the iconic Peace Pagoda shrine, the Pump House art gallery, and the flower-filled Old English Garden.

7. Electrify Your Life in God’s Own Junkyard

God’s Own Junkyard is a cafe-turned-exhibit filled with electrifying neon signs. Artist Chris Bracey assembled the stunning display from his pieces. At times, Chris rescues broken neon signs on their way to the grave and restores them.

Thanks to his storied career, you’ll find pieces used in blockbuster films, circuses, festivals, and more. The site for God’s Own Junkyard describes the joint perfectly: It’s “where neon never dies.”

8. Check Out Street Art in Shoreditch

london review of books reputation

In a city known for its art and entertainment, Shoreditch is a hub of phenomenal street art. The roadways of Shoreditch are lined with thousands of vibrant street art pieces that highlight countless artists’ styles, themes, and identities. The ultra-famous street artist Bansky has painted numerous works on buildings in this area. Those interested in background information on popular pieces can schedule a guided tour through Shoreditch. Still, you can swing through the area on your own and enjoy the surprising beauty around each corner.

9. Eat Your Way Through Kingly Court

Many tourists end up shopping in the stores at Carnaby’s, but many others miss out on its massive international food court. Kingly Court is tucked away, yet it’s packed to the brim with cuisines from around the world — think France, Peru, Italy, Japan, the Caribbean, and the U.S. The restaurants scale four stories over a gorgeous open-air courtyard. Relax under an umbrella and enjoy whatever dishes you decide to grab. Any true foodies will adore a delicious afternoon spent in Kingly Court.

10. Explore the Ghostly Site of Nunhead Cemetery

This Victorian cemetery is hauntingly beautiful and identified as one of London’s “Magnificent Seven.” Created in 1840, Nunhead Cemetery features grand displays of love and grief in place of simple headstones. Portions of the cemetery have grown decrepit over time. However, the overgrown weeds add to the fright factor of the area’s Gothic architecture. The cemetery remains open thanks to the support of Friends of Nunhead Cemetery (FONC), which maintains the grounds. This is an essential dark tourism stop for amateur ghost hunters, architecture admirers, and history nerds.

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london review of books reputation

mary-kay wilmers

Is the LRB the best magazine in the world?

T he offices of the London Review of Books are situated on the top two floors of a Georgian townhouse in the shadow of the British Museum. To reach them, you either brave the claustrophobically small lift or walk up five flights of brown-carpeted stairs, before emerging in a light-filled room containing a scattering of terrifically bright people sitting at computers, surrounded by piles of books and an air of quiet industry.

The windows on one side of the large open-plan room overlook the nurses' accommodation for the nearby University College Hospital, where someone has left a carton of orange juice to chill on a window ledge. The LRB 's editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, likes this view. She enjoys "seeing what the nurses get up to". On the other side, the windows overlook a fine Hawksmoor church spire, with carved heraldic symbols of a lion and a unicorn at its base. Wilmers doesn't have as much time for this. Most people would proffer some admiring blandishment about architectural style – but not Wilmers. "They're too fat," she sniffs at the stonework animals. And looking at them, it's hard not to concede that they are, indeed, a bit flabby.

The opposing London vistas, and Wilmers' reaction to them, seem to sum up her approach to editing what is now deemed to be the most successful literary publication in Europe. At 75, Wilmers retains both an insatiable curiosity about people (the nurses) and a healthy disregard for received opinion (the church). Both qualities course through the pages of the London Review of Books which, under her 22-year editorship, has become a highly regarded publication with an influence that extends far beyond the rarefied world of small-circulation literary magazines.

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Founded in 1979, after the Times Literary Supplement was closed by a year-long industrial dispute, the LRB has a circulation of 64,038 (by comparison, according to 2013 Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, the Spectator has a circulation of 62,581 and the New Statesman of 28,495). The website attracts 575,000 visitors a month and there are a further 2,000 Kindle subscribers. At a time when most print publications are losing readers, the LRB 's circulation is going up.

Partly, this is to do with the commissions. Alongside the usual run of densely typed book reviews, arts criticism, authors' diaries and classified advertisements offering writers' retreats in the Peloponnese, Wilmers has made a feature of the long-form essay. The essay, usually penned by a leading author and often running to well over 10,000 words, with barely a concession to the fanciful modern desire for accompanying photographs or illustration, has become the LRB 's forte. These are the pieces that consistently challenge orthodoxy and take delight in a well-constructed argument; that dare to say things the rest of us might be thinking or that simply reveal something interesting or curious.

One of her recent favourites, says Wilmers, was a piece on "the language of bribery". At its best, the LRB long-form essay is clever, mischievous, fascinating and fluent. At its worst, it might go on a bit.

"I think there's an awful lot of short opinion around," says Wilmers, "and it's quite nice to find an argument in a piece that isn't just stated."

She is sitting in a small corner room on a sofa upholstered in countrified pale-green and red stripes. For unexplained reasons, there is an abandoned iron and an Anglepoise lamp on the floor that Wilmers had to step over, somewhat shakily in ballet pumps, to get to her seat. She is a small woman with a striking face and shrewd eyes. Her physical appearance is elegant but economical, crafted with the same precision as a judiciously edited sentence.

Does she think, in a modern, media-driven world where opinions are increasingly reduced to soundbites of 140 characters or fewer, that there is a thirst for longer-form writing?

"I think that must, to some extent, be the case because otherwise, why would we be doing so much better than other papers?" And it is true that, over the past year, the London Review of Books has found itself in the unusual position of being the centre of rather a lot of attention. There was a recent public spat concerning the lack of female reviewers in its pages , but much of the interest has been generated by the introduction of a Winter Lecture series – speeches delivered by writers in person on a particular topic and then printed at full-length as an essay in the magazine.

Hilary Mantel did one in February 2013, in which she called the Duchess of Cambridge "a shop-window mannequin" . The Daily Mail promptly featured the "attack" on its front page and David Cameron was moved to comment that Mantel was "completely misguided and completely wrong".

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When James Meek analysed the housing market in the pages of the LRB in January ("A housing shortage that has been building up for the past 30 years is reaching the point of crisis"), it triggered a national debate. The current issue carries an extraordinary 26,000-word piece by Andrew O'Hagan on his failed attempt to ghost the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's memoir , which was trending on Twitter before copies even hit the news-stands. The next issue features classicist Mary Beard's lecture on "the public voice of women", which has already caused a splash following her assertion that women who speak up in the public sphere are "treated as freakish androgynes".

Does she enjoy the controversies generated by the magazine? Her lips twitch into an almost-smile. Her eyes, below the silver fringe of her bobbed hair, crinkle at the corners. "I don't un-enjoy it," she replies carefully. She says she "never, ever would have predicted" the fall-out generated by the Hilary Mantel piece. "If you read the whole thing, it's really not… there's not much of an issue there. She was feeling sorry for her [the Duchess of Cambridge] more than anything."

What about the piece written in 2007 by Booker-prize winner Anne Enright concerning the parents of Madeleine McCann ("I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve") or Mary Beard writing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that America "had it coming"?

"'People will say America had it coming' is what she said!" Wilmers corrects impatiently. "Well, everybody said we would have bombs put through our letterbox." And did they? "No. It just caught on and it obviously touched a nerve because there were people who presumably did think that."

This is, in many respects, a key part of the LRB 's ethos: it provides a space in which intelligent people can think differently; in which discomfiting thoughts can be voiced and provoking arguments can be aired with enough room to breathe.

The writer Marina Warner, who is one of the magazine's contributing editors, compares the LRB 's pages to "a lively discussion among engaged people… I like its range – and its boldness in allowing different views and strong opinions, and the length of the pieces allows for developing arguments and laying out evidence." Andrew O'Hagan agrees: "The paper is enquiring, funny, political, ambivalent, and filled with a sense of risk."

Wilmers sees the LRB as an antidote to the sameness of opinion in the rest of the media. "Newspapers say the same thing over and over again and we're all horrified and collectively up in arms and there's normally more than one side to something," she says. "So if you hear somebody saying something coherent and intelligent that's not totally out of order, it's interesting to read it."

Twitter, with its emphasis on instant reaction and opinion-forming cliques is, she thinks, part of the problem. "Why do people feel compelled to agree with everybody? It would be quite nice if there was slightly less outrage about the same things all the time."

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Is Wilmers on Twitter? "No," she says and then immediately contradicts herself: "I mean, yes, I am. I've only ever been on once, when Jenny Diski asked me to do something."

Her Twitter avatar, rather confusingly, is the image of a fresh-faced young woman. "That's my god-daughter, Flora Neve," she says sternly. No further explanation is forthcoming and I suddenly feel rather foolish for asking.

For all its success, the London Review of Books struggles to make money. It owes its continued existence to the generosity of Wilmers herself, who regularly siphons in cash from a family trust fund. Her German father was the founder of a multinational utilities company and her ancestors on her mother's side were Russian Jews who included the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon and Leonid Eitingon, a Stalinist agent responsible for masterminding the assassination of Leon Trotsky. Wilmers was born in Chicago, raised in New York, then moved with her family to Brussels aged nine and was sent to boarding school in England.

Did she like boarding school?

[Deadpan] "It was better than Brussels."

Having grown up abroad, does she feel like an outsider?

"You mean, do I feel foreign?" A pause. "When it suits me."

The family money means the LRB never has to worry about paying back its loans – in January 2010, the magazine was estimated to be £27m in debt to the trust. And yet it still manages to pay its writers at a base-rate of 30p a word (rising by a considerable margin if the article is longer than average). The fee for O'Hagan's piece on Assange was rumoured to be in five figures. Marina Warner says that payment is always processed quickly "and generously, by comparison with other papers".

Is it sustainable, I ask the LRB 's publisher, Nicholas Spice? He looks vaguely shocked at the suggestion. "Oh no, it's not sustainable in financial terms," he says.

Spice has a pleasantly straightforward manner and a faintly military demeanour. He is the kind of man you suspect would be incapable of telling a lie, even though sometimes he probably should. "It loses a lot of money," he continues cheerfully. "The most important thing is that it has always had very generous support from its shareholders. And we've had the same shareholders since 1980, which is very unusual – I should think unprecedented – for a literary publication or arts organisation. The great thing is that we have been able to invest in creating a market for a very good editorial product."

The LRB has made inroads in other areas – there is a nearby London Review of Books bookshop, and a popular cake-shop that serves rosebud tea and gluten-free pistachio cakes – but even these, according to Spice, are only "near to breaking even".

"The great thing about the bookshop is it gives the magazine a location," Spice says, still looking on the brightest possible side, "and it's very good for our relations with publishers."

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The seeming lack of financial constraint means that the LRB can be run in a charmingly old-fashioned, semi-shambolic manner. There is, admits Wilmers, "an element of whim" to each issue. Writers are not given much of a deadline – "we're not too fussy about time, then after a few months the piece comes in" – and the editors take a great deal of care over the copy. Every fact is checked and proofs are sent back to the writer with suggestions and queries and then, says Wilmers: "there's all that awful stuff about spacing and line-breaks, which I'm sure nobody notices, but we do".

Many of the writers have never met the staff and Wilmers herself has acquired a healthy degree of mystique.

"I've never met Mary-Kay Wilmers," says Adam Mars-Jones , a regular contributor, "and by the end of last year had come to think that was a good thing. If she liked my writing it seemed a bit rash to think she might like me as well."

The magazine goes to press on Friday night and the staff are often there into the early hours. Until recently, they ordered in supper from a local Indian restaurant much favoured by Wilmers. But she went on holiday a few weeks ago and returned to find that her staff had staged a silent coup and were getting their food from Ottolenghi instead. She doesn't like it as much. "Perhaps," she says, fiddling with the hem of her silk blouse, "it's just because I think, 'How dare they!'"

She's joking. I think.

One of the criticisms levelled at the LRB is that it can occasionally seem cosseted from the real world, run by an exclusive coterie of literary-minded north Londoners who don't have to worry about anything so vulgar as the bottom line. Wilmers is an established part of the liberal-leaning Primrose Hill intelligentsia: she was married to the film director Stephen Frears (the couple divorced in the 70s and have two sons, Sam and Will) and used to live next door to the biographer Claire Tomalin and her husband, the writer Michael Frayn. The playwright Jonathan Miller was down the road. Her best friend from Oxford (where she read modern languages) is Alan Bennett.

When I put this to her, Wilmers blinks. "Does everybody live in north London?" she asks herself, before going through a mental checklist of contributors and staff. "John Lanchester doesn't," she announces triumphantly. Spice says that most of their readers come from N and NW postcodes. Anywhere else?

"Clapham," he replies briskly.

But the LRB 's tendency to pluck writers from the same limited pool of contributors has a more serious knock-on effect: they have consistently struggled to publish as many women as men, for instance. In 2013, they used 43 female book reviewers compared to 195 male, according to figures compiled by the American literary organisation Vida . The Paris Review , by contrast, achieved a 50/50 parity of men and women, while the New York Times book review published 725 women and 894 men. It is not just the review pages: over its history, the LRB has published 82% of articles by men and just 18% by women.

The issue was recently aired in a discussion on Open Book on Radio 4. The LRB declined to participate and issued a rather imperious statement claiming that the inequality in their pages was regrettable but reflected a wider discrimination in an imperfect world. The statement included a quote from Wilmers, given in a 2001 interview on the same subject: "I think women find it difficult to do their jobs, look after their children, cook dinner and write pieces," Wilmers said at the time. "They just can't get it done. And men can… They're not so frightened of asserting themselves. And they're not so anxious to please."

LRBmeek

Listeners were duly enraged by the intimation that female writers were too busy scrubbing dishes to use their critical faculties. When I ask Wilmers about the episode, she visibly braces. "Obviously, over the years I've been discriminated against plenty," she says. "It started when I finished university and was told to go and learn to write shorthand by the Oxford 'head of women's appointments'. So, obviously, I know what it's like. I know what the problem is. And all I can say is that we hope to do better, we hope to get more female reviewers, blah blah blah."

But how exactly do they hope to do better? "Well, we hope we will find more women writers. We will look for more women." She glances anxiously towards the closed door that leads into the office and starts mouthing to me that she's been told not to say anything by her colleagues and they don't want her stirring it all up again. And yet, being of a naturally honest disposition, Wilmers can't help herself.

Surely that comment about women being too busy doing the household chores to write was spectacularly misguided? "Yes," she concedes. "I think the situation has changed because, certainly, when I was married, I did the washing up, I did the cooking, I looked after the children… I think that's much less the case now. Men do much more so women have less to do. So I think there has been a change but I do think men are more inclined to say 'Oh fuck it. I'll do whatever I want to do now. My career matters. I'll go and write a novel', whereas women are a bit more ho-hummy about their careers.

"All that has really changed since I've been working. When I was at Oxford, there was one woman for every 10 men. Imagine that. I mean, that's quite a statistic. So yes, it's changed a lot and there are many more women writers now in the LRB than there were 40, 50 years ago."

The irony is that Wilmers did end up becoming a secretary. After peripatetic upbringing that took her from America to Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium and England, Wilmers read French and Russian at Oxford. She had ambitions to be a simultaneous interpreter but ended up as a secretary at the offices of Faber & Faber. At the time, T S Eliot was director. "I was quite disappointed with him," she says. "He'd thank people for their 'gracious' letter and I though 'Gosh, what a terrible word.'"

She left Faber and had spells at the Listener magazine and the Times Literary Supplement before co-founding the LRB in 1979, originally as an offshoot of the New York Review of Books .

And all the while, she was coping with single motherhood and the emotional grind of raising a sick child. Wilmers's youngest son, Sam, was born with Riley-Day syndrome, a rare condition that affects the development of the nervous system. Sam was subject to seizures, poor co-ordination, failing eyesight and breathing issues. Today, in his 40s, he is almost blind but "thriving" , Wilmers says fondly, "because he's got such a good character".

Her work, she says, was an integral part of keeping her sane. "I think I found it easier with the job than I would have without. I would have been that much more anxious about my son had I been at home watching him all the time."

She sees her role as editor in the same terms as the simultaneous interpreter she once wanted to be; they are both, she says, "ventriloquial occupations. It's speaking through other people. It's not that I'm not as egomaniacal as everyone else. It's just that I say a bit less."

She has written an acclaimed volume of family history, The Eitingons , but says she lacks the "inventiveness" to write a novel. I mention to her that I recently read Love, Nina , a delightful collection of letters written by Wilmers's former nanny, Nina Stibbe, while she was living with the family in the 80s. In it, Stibbe writes about Wilmers's habit of "piping up with a defining two words" while "everyone else [is] yakking and being boring and pointless".

Does she recognise that in herself? "Yes!" she says. "It's not what I most like about myself but I have to say, yes I do. But… um… it's that I don't necessarily have all the interim sentences. Those words are the two words I have. It's a bit of a defect."

But her facility for distilling a sentence makes her, according to Andrew O'Hagan, one of the great editors. "She and Karl Miller have done more for the British essay than anyone in the past 150 years," he says. "Mary-Kay works harder than any editor I know. And if this were France, they'd be posting the Légion d'honneur through her door every morning."

I wonder whether, at the age of 75, having lived through an era of unequal pay and endemic discrimination, part of Wilmers's attitude to the lack of female reviewers in the LRB is explained by a belief that people should just get on and do things rather than waste time complaining about them? "Yes, absolutely." Her feminism is, she concedes, "old-fashioned… I tend to take exception to men in a big way, but that's a slightly outmoded form of feminism."

Men as a general concept or men as individuals? "Men as a general concept, and individual men when they're behaving like men."

Is that why her marriage failed? "No. I mean, it was probably a foolish idea in the first place. I don't feel antipathy [towards men], I just am inclined to think that…" She breaks off. "It happened earlier this morning. You're talking to a male colleague, trying to get your point of view across, and then another male colleague walks across and agrees sagaciously with what the other man is saying. That always happens."

Does she say anything?

I can't imagine, given her innate need to get on and do things, that she has altogether embraced the ageing process. "I feel appalled," she admits. "I keep thinking I'll wake up and find I'm not 75 any more." She has noticed a certain stickiness in the whirring of the mental cogs – when trying to convert dollars into sterling, for instance, or when she makes mistakes on the computer "and there's quite a lot of groaning" from her colleagues.

How will she give up this job, I wonder, when the time comes? "With difficulty," she says. "But the editor of the New York Review of Books is 10 years older than me. That's what I cling to."

The London Review of Books might not feature enough women in its pages. But there's no doubt that the one at its helm is pretty formidable.

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The LRB is 40. We never thought it would last this long

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Sam Miller: ‘What we had felt stronger than most father-son relationships’

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WB Yeats, the art teacher and a night at the sexologist’s

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Karl Miller: a man of distinction

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Karl Miller, founding editor of London Review of Books, dies at 83

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London Review of Books: all hail this splendid magazine that reveres the written word

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Tareq baconi.

O n 29 ​ December , the most right-wing government in Israeli history was sworn in, returning Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, to power. Unlike most recent governments – there have been five elections in less than four years – this one has a stable parliamentary majority, with 64 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Alongside cabinet posts for members...

Palestinians understand that Israel is a democracy for Jews and an apartheid regime for non-Jews. But just like the Green Line, this is a false separation, since the Jewish democratic system itself is dependent on ethnic exclusion and demographic engineering. The liberals condemning the rise of fascism in Israeli politics are fighting for the rights of only part of the population.

Crisis in Care

James butler.

Translating ethical urgency into a politics of care would not lack for pathologies: it would be potentially suffocating, conformist, a licence for moral scolds wielding duty as a cudgel and inclined to conceal abuse. But the urgency remains. All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. We are shaped by individual, consequential but highly contingent acts of care, or their absence. To think about care is to shuttle back and forth between social totality and the irreducible complexity of individual needs, from feeding or washing to dignity or meaningful attention. Because it concerns the state, care must be thought of in the aggregate – unit costs, labour time, population trends – but many carers worry that such categories miss everything significant about their work. It doesn’t help that so many definitions of care are vague or tautologous, constituting the entire range of social activities that allow human beings to exist in the world.

All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. To think about care is to shuttle back and forth between social totality and the irreducible complexity of individual needs, from feeding or washing to dignity or meaningful attention. Because it concerns the state, care must be thought of in the aggregate – unit costs, labour time, population trends – but many carers worry that such categories miss everything significant about their work.

In the latest issue

2 march 2023.

Exercise Your Mind

Give your mind its most exhilarating workout yet – subscribe to the LRB , Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas.

Enlightenment Environmentalism

Oliver cussen.

Recognition of nature’s finitude served as a ‘conceptual a priori to economic thought’, if not undermining optimism then at least providing a note of caution in an age otherwise obsessed with perfectibility and progress. If even the most optimistic climate theorists were haunted by the prospect of degradation and, in extreme cases, apocalypse, it was because they lived in Adam Smith’s world, where the pursuit of prosperity was partly motivated by a ‘permanent anxiety’ about the limits of nature.

It might be easy to conclude that 17th-century​ Europeans dismissed any natural limits to progress, or were oblivious to its impact on the environment. But the modern project of autonomy and abundance if anything made it easier to attribute ecological change to human agency. Far from rendering the environment invisible, the Enlightenment turned it into a subject of political and economic debate.

Against America

Barclay bram.

There was more than one America in the Chinese imagination. There was the imperial America of the Mao era, ‘which oppressed its own people, and people all over the world’. But that vision of America had faltered when Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979. Images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must have something figured out. Wang wasn’t so sure. The America he saw was neither an imperialist paper tiger nor universally prosperous. He kept noticing its contradictions.

When Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979, images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must have something figured out. Wang Huning wasn’t so sure. The America he saw was neither an imperialist paper tiger nor universally prosperous. He kept noticing its contradictions.

Turner Prize 2022

Frances morgan.

Sin Wai Kin talks to a tree (it talks back) and slurps noodles in a café, reflecting on his dinner: ‘Once it was a pig, once it was a prawn, once it was matter and energy.’ Sin’s performances of gender animate the film, but it’s not ‘about’ gender, except as one of a number of ordering systems that, following Chuang-Tzu’s maxim ‘the name is the guest of the substance,’ are always being rethought.

There is a tendency to linger on the physical vulnerability and discomfort evoked by Veronica Ryan’s pieces, part of a series called Infection which includes plaster casts of yellowing orthopaedic pillows, but it would be a mistake to project Ryan’s slow path to professional recognition onto the work itself. This isn’t outsider art. 

Peter Howarth

W igtown ​ was the last stop on my summer festival research tour. Over the last ten or fifteen years, many music festivals have started to include a poetry and books stage, and local council-led festivals are now doing so too. Helped by its kinship with rap and stand-up, spoken word has flourished at music festivals, and poetry stages now host everything from collective improv to the poet...

Calling something a festival is no guarantee it will actually become festive in the deep sense. Some Sundays, like some festivals, are exercises in niche connoisseurship more than genuine enthusiasm. Others are doomed gesticulations to a half-empty tent.

‘Saint Omer’

Michael wood.

A lice Diop’s ​ film Saint Omer is a work of fiction, but close, in various ways, to her documentary Danton’s Death (2011), a study of a Black man from the Paris suburbs who spends three years at the Cours Simon, a drama school not far from Père Lachaise cemetery. In both films there are intense close-ups of faces, and Diop often allows these and other frames to linger longer...

To find her guilty, the lawyer says, would be to decide that Laurence is a monster – ‘It is more convenient to see her as a monster’ – and such a decision would be a verdict but would not be justice (‘un arrêt, mais pas la justice’). She talks of mothers and children, born and unborn, exchanging cells that scientists call ‘chimerical’. ‘We women are all monsters, but terribly human monsters.’

Military Racism

I n American ​ popular memory, the Second World War remains the ‘good war’, fought, to borrow the title of Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book, by the ‘greatest generation’. It is remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity. The war in...

While Blacks were fighting for the Double V – victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home – the federal government’s recruitment posters promoted the idea that military success would restore the prewar world, grounded in traditions of work, family and, implicitly, segregation. (Senator James Eastland of Mississippi was quite candid about this: on the Senate floor he declared that white soldiers were ‘fighting to maintain white supremacy’.)

On Prince Harry

Andrew o’hagan.

Harry will allow no contradiction and no variance – ‘Recollections may vary,’ the late queen said – and only when his wider family shows that it ‘deeply appreciates’ the truth of what he’s gone through will ‘reconciliation’ be possible. Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is 100 per cent a possibility,’ and that he’s ‘open’ to helping the royal family understand its own unconscious bias. It must be quite annoying, if you’re them. You don’t have to be Baudrillard to feel that Harry’s idea of the truth is simplistic, and that he’s become a bit of a fundamentalist: anything that isn’t ‘my truth’ is automatically part of the big lie. Harry has set out to convince the world that his family are professional liars, with one or two saving graces, such as heavenly anointment. And he’s not wrong.

The art of biography appears to the prince to be a pane of clear glass through which the truth will finally be revealed to the reader. Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting.

Saving a Life

Patricia lockwood.

I t ​ was a perfect day, and we paid for it. Out the ass , I wrote on hotel stationery later, before deciding to reject the easy joke; I was a tasteful person now, having passed through the refiner’s fire.

8 May. We had flown into LA from Savannah the night before; the city, from our hotel room, looked like a heat map of itself. The jacarandas were blooming. Everyone describes the...

The next day, thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, eight hours into the flight from LA to London, it happened. ‘Something is very wrong inside me,’ Jason said on his way back from the bathroom, bending over my row with his face white and his arm held rigid over his lower abdomen.

What’s your story?

Terry eagleton.

F orty years ago ​, Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot , which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into...

If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along.

Adolfo Kaminsky’s Forgeries

Kaminsky bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But when a man known as Penguin (aka Marc Hamon) recruited him for the Resistance, he wasn’t interested in his knowledge of explosives so much as his knowledge of dyes. The Resistance needed papers for passeurs at the border, for members parachuting in from the UK and for Jews at risk of deportation. Kaminsky proved remarkably resourceful and inventive.

Adolfo Kaminsky died in Paris last month aged 97. It was largely thanks to him that the German-occupied zone of wartime France was flooded with false documents. The Occupation authorities were on his trail, but they never suspected that the forger they were after was a teenager.

From the blog

There is a tendency to view the UK-Saudi relationship in purely commercial terms, as though arms industry profits were the main point. Orders  . . .

Whose Turn?

Adéwálé májà-pearce.

Most of the results from Saturday’s presidential and national assembly elections in Nigeria are in and it seems that Bọ́lá Ahmed Tinúbú  . . .

Cookies and Yogurt

De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising is to Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back what Bob Kaufman’s Abomunist Manifesto  . . .

Carnival Redux

Forrest hylton.

Among the visitors to Salvador was the US ambassador, Elizabeth Bagley, who was photographed leaning from a window to shake hands with Governor  . . .

The Rainmakers of the American Southwest

Meg bernhard.

I learned of the cloud seeders in Red Rock Canyon from a friend’s husband. It was late autumn in Beatty, Nevada, a windswept town two hours  . . .

AKA 1988-2023

Sean jacobs.

On 10 February, the rapper AKA (Kiernan Forbes) was murdered in downtown Durban, along with his friend and manager, Tebello ‘Tibz’ Motsoane  . . .

Fireworks in Berlin

Harry stopes.

The elections held in September 2021 for the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus, the state parliament, were marred by administrative problems at nearly  . . .

Akhenaten in Ankara

Ayşe zarakol.

Akhenaten is sometimes credited with inventing monotheism, but I think of him rather as the first extreme political centraliser. The Ancient  . . .

Collections

World weather.

From June 2022 to June 2023, the LRB is collaborating with the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts organisations in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland, rainforests,...

LRB Winter Lectures 2010-2020

Judith Butler on who owns Kafka; Hilary Mantel on royal bodies; Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange; Mary Beard on women in power; Patricia Lockwood on the communal mind of the internet; Meehan Crist...

Analysis Gone Wrong

Unorthodox psychoanalytic encounters in the LRB archive by Wynne Godley, Sherry Turkle, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Nicholas Spice, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jenny Diski, Brigid Brophy, Adam Phillips, D.J. Enright...

How shall we repaint the kitchen?

Writing about colour in the LRB archive by Ian Hacking, Anne Enright, John Kinsella, Alison Light, Julian Bell, David Garrioch, Emily LaBarge and Stephen Mulhall.

London Review of Crooks

Writing about how (not) to commit fraud by Walter Benjamin, Deborah Friedell, Daniel Soar, Vadim Nikitin, Steven Shapin, Pooja Bhatia, James Lasdun, Bee Wilson, John Lanchester and Robert Marshall-Andrews. 

The view from here and now

Writing about memory and history by Hilary Mantel, Thomas Nagel, Salman Rushdie, Eric Hobsbawm, Jorie Graham, Tom Crewe, Rosalind Mitchison, Adam Phillips and Steven Mithen.

Plato made it up

Writing about myth and the stories we tell ourselves by Margaret Anne Doody, Marina Warner, Mary Beard, Anne Carson, James Davidson, Tom Shippey, Joanna Kavenna, Lorna Sage and Michael Wood.

A Child Let Loose

Writing about children’s literature by Joan Aiken, Bee Wilson, Marina Warner, Wendy Doniger, Rosemary Hill, Jenny Turner, Marghanita Laski, Andrew O’Hagan, Jenny Diski and Gillian Avery.

Down among the Press Lords

Writing about the press by Andrew O’Hagan, Ross McKibbin, Jenny Diski, James Meek, Suzanne Moore, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Alan Rusbridger, Thomas Nagel and Raymond Williams.

Living by the Clock

Writing about time by David Cannadine, Perry Anderson, Angela Carter, Stanley Cavell, Barbara Everett, Edward Said, John Banville, Rebecca Solnit, David Wootton, Jenny Diski, Malcolm Bull, Andrew O’Hagan...

Writing about space by Carolin Crawford, Tim Radford, Nick Richardson, Jenny Diski, Anne Enright, Chris Lintott, James Hamilton-Paterson, Serafina Cuomo, Linsey McGoey, Thomas Jones, John Leslie, Rivka...

No Cheating!

Writing about cheating in sport and beyond by John Lanchester, Andrew McGettigan, James Romm, Hilary Mantel, David Runciman, Dinah Birch, Rebecca Solnit and Fiona Pitt-Kethley.

The Blue Pill

‘It doesn’t require a vast leap of psychoanalytic speculation,’ William Davies writes on the LRB blog, ‘to surmise that feelings may attach themselves to iconic public objects which are really...

The Red Pill

‘The phenomenological ego is a temporal matter,’ Fredric Jameson wrote in a piece about hyperspace from 2015, ‘and time itself one of its fundamental paradoxes.’ So take the red pill and spend...

The Queen and I

Writing about the queen, her family and the institution she inhabited, by William Empson, Gabriele Annan, Jonathan Meades, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom Nairn, Hilary Mantel, Tom Crewe, Linda Colley and Rosemary...

Making and breaking in the LRB archive by Adam Phillips, T.J. Clark, George Hyde, Jenny Diski, Sheila Heti, Barbara Everett, Ross McKibbin, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton and Patricia Lockwood.

Writing about drinking by Victor Mallet, Anne Carson, John Lanchester, Wendy Cope, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Jaine, Jenny Diski, Marina Warner, Clancy Martin and John Lloyd. 

In Hyperspace

Writing about science fiction by Jonathan Lethem, Fredric Jameson, Jenny Turner, Tom Shippey, Colin Burrow, Stephanie Burt, Thomas Jones, Margaret Anne Doody, Nick Richardson, Sherry Turkle and Rachel...

In the Classroom

Writing about teaching and learning by William Davies, Ian Jack, Jenny Turner, Thomas Jones, Lorna Finlayson, Paul Foot, Wang Xiuying, Marina Warner and Stefan Collini. 

On Giving Up

Writing about quitting by Adam Phillips, Jonathan Coe, Anne Carson, Thomas Jones, David Wheatley, Jenny Turner and Jenny Diski. 

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Alison Bashford

Alison bashford and meehan crist.

In the third episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to historian Alison Bashford. Alison discusses the history of efforts to control population size, how population is thought about in the Anthropocene, and how suspending critique of the past can give valuable insight into the present.

This is the unabridged...

Alison Bashford discusses the history of efforts to control population size, how population is thought about in the Anthropocene, and how suspending critique of the past can give valuable insight into the present.

The Weirdness of Paul Newman

Bee wilson and malin hay.

The screen legend and salad dressing philanthropist Paul Newman recorded hundreds of personal interviews before destroying the tapes. The surviving transcripts, worked into a recent memoir and documentary series, reveal a more complex Newman than his on-screen laconicism would suggest. Bee Wilson speaks to Malin Hay about Newman’s mystique – his passivity, his domesticity and...

Bee Wilson speaks to Malin Hay about Paul Newman’s mystique – his passivity, his domesticity and his irresistible blue eyes.

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Banu Subramaniam

Banu subramaniam and meehan crist.

In the second episode of a four-part series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to Banu Subramaniam, the evolutionary biologist and feminist science scholar. Subramaniam talks about the global persistence of Malthusian thinking, why the focus of policymakers on population often means focusing on the bodies of poor and marginalised women, and how historical...

In the second episode of a four-part series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to Banu Subramaniam, the evolutionary biologist and feminist science scholar.

Wildfowling on Frampton Marsh

James meek and anthony wilks.

James Meek goes wildfowling with DeWayne Cross in November 2021, while researching his piece on housebuilding and floodplains in and around Boston, Lincolnshire.

Read the piece here: Underwater Living

Filmed and edited by Anthony Wilks.

Read the piece here: Underwater...

Modern-ish Poets (Live): The Waste Land

Mark ford and seamus perry.

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry return for the final episode in their Close Readings series, Modern-ish Poets , looking at 19th and 20th century poetry. On the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in book form, Mark and Seamus consider how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous meanings that have been drawn out of it, and its lasting influence.This is the...

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry return for the final episode in their Close Readings series, Modern-ish Poets , looking at 19th and 20th century poetry. On the centenary of the publication of...

The Lost Art of Paste-Up

Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting required a sharp scalpel, a parallel-motion board and plenty of glue.

As the  London Review of Books  celebrates its 40th anniversary, we look back at what paste-up used to involve in the...

Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting...

Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...

‘If you are going to spend thirty quid on 100 grams of monkey-picked oolong, what are you going to drink it out of?’ – Jenny Diski

The 2023 LRB Winter Lectures

After a two-year pandemic hiatus, the LRB Winter Lectures are back. We’re delighted to announce that our 2023 lecturers are William Davies, Clair Wills and Terry Castle. 

Nicole Flattery & Claire-Louise Bennett: Nothing Special

Terry castle: some mortifications of family history, claudia rankine & nicola rollock: plot.

In the next issue: Clair Wills on ‘How to Plot an Abortion’, the second of this year’s LRB Winter Lectures.

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Press Gazette

How the London Review of Books became a bestseller

By Andrew Kersley

London Review of Books|

When was the last time you read about Japanese bondage clubs and ancient Roman poets wanting to make their critics perform fellatio ?

If it’s been a while, then you have not been reading the London Review of Books.

“There was a piece somewhere on the internet recently that referred to us as being rather staid and mentioned we had recently opened an issue with a review of a new translation of Catullus,” co-editor Alice Spawls tells me. “In fact, that piece was one of the funniest things we’ve published this year.

“It described Roman poetry through metaphors of Japanese bondage and was very sexy and unexpected.”

Proton launches dedicated VPN servers for access to censored Deutsche Welle

Proton launches dedicated VPN servers for access to censored Deutsche Welle

Metro editor interview: 'Refresh' gives title 'one voice' after print redundancies

Metro editor interview: ‘Refresh’ gives title ‘one voice’ after print redundancies

Tortoise claims 90% podcast listenership growth in a year

Tortoise claims 90% podcast listenership growth in a year

Despite running articles that can stretch into the tens of thousands of words, the LRB has gone from being a niche offering to one of the most popular cultural and current affairs magazines in the UK.

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The publication proudly boasts on its website that one reader described it as “the best thing about being a human”.

“A lot of people feel they know the character of the paper better than we do. We get told off for any perceived fallings off from perfection,” says Jean McNicol, the magazine’s other co-editor. “People feel part of something… In all sorts of strange places you go you meet somebody who has some encyclopaedic knowledge of the paper, some people are quite obsessed with it.”

And that fanbase isn’t small anymore either. The LRB’s fortnightly print magazine has a circulation of 91,859, according to the most recent ABC figures (95% of which were actively purchased).

'Looking for sustainable, profitable growth'

That’s a 4% increase on the year before and well over double the readership the magazine had 15 years ago . It makes it the fifth best selling title in Press Gazette's news and current affairs ranking , with only The Economist, The Week, Private Eye and Time selling more. The New York Review of Books, the parent publication that helped launch the LRB in 1979, itself had a  2020 circulation of 131,598 .

“Looking for sustainable, profitable growth is what underpins our subscription strategy,” says LRB publisher Reneé Doegar, who adds that the magazine saw five years' worth of subscription growth during the pandemic. “In terms of the annual growth over time, it's just been based on really clear data and using really various kinds of sophisticated modelling."

But despite its success, the LRB team often struggle to find the words to define themselves. Each year, in its annual ABC circulation audit the magazine is classified as a general interest literary magazine, the sole publication in that category. Doegar says the group “have the conversation all the time of whether or not we're in the right one”.

It seems a fitting problem for a publication that publishes content that few other outlets would. “I think part of what we would hope is the appeal everywhere is eclecticism. Our diary slot can be anything from someone reporting from a warzone to Alan Bennett listing the best churches he's visited,” says Spawls. “A good example of it might be in the last issue, there's a short piece about using a typewriter. I don't know where else you would read that.”

The LRB list of 15 contributing editors (the title given to regular contributors) covers journalists, professors and Booker Prize-winning authors, including Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín and Patricia Lockwood. Over the years, the likes of Alan Bennett, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Foot have been regular contributors to the magazine.

But it also features unknown writers and journalists, some of whom go on to become household names, and finding the right people to feature is an ongoing challenge.

'The pressure is there to be 24/7'

The magazine’s captivated followers send in hundreds of submissions for each edition – “most of them aren't very good, or very interesting though,” Spawls remarks. “You just have to try lots of people. And some of them work and can end up being a big thing.”

Being fortnighly (like Private Eye) brings its own complications. “You always seem to go to press at the wrong time,” McNicol explains. “Elections always come on the wrong week, the war starts on the wrong day – which actually happened with one of our most recent issues.”

Do they ever want to break from the straitjacket of the fortnightly print cycle? “The pressure is there to be a 24/7 publication,” says Spawls. “But we try to add to the conversation in a way that the quickfire news responses can’t.”

Despite its geographically-weighted name, the LRB is also increasingly a global phenomenon with roughly 44% of its readers coming from the UK, 33% from the US and the remaining 23% from the rest of the world.

That global community has always been part of LRB's DNA according to McNicol, who is herself Scottish. Even in the old LRB office she recalls machines printing out addresses as far away as Vanuatu in indelible black ink.

Her mention of the old office is telling. She and Spawls only took over the editorship of the LRB in January 2021, when LRB co-founder Mary-Kay Wilmers, who edited the publication for more than 30 years, stood down. Later that year, Doegar took over the mantle of publisher from Nicholas Spice, who had been in the role for almost the magazine’s entire 41-year lifespan.

london review of books reputation

Image: Renee Doegar / The LRB

Both Spawls and McNicol are LRB lifers. Joining in 2011 and 1987 respectively, both spent their entire careers at the magazine working under Wilmers. Doegar stands out as the closest thing to an outsider, having worked for Haymarket Publishing for just over six years before joining the LRB in 2011.

All three speak with an almost sacred reverence for Wilmers and her tenure as editor of the LRB, from her open-mindedness and ability to find new writers to her dedication to constantly searching for articles in the colossal "slush pile" - their name for pitches or un-commissioned articles the publication gets sent.

“Lots of people just don't bother with them. But she was always very keen that we should look at them,” says McNicol. “There are things in the paper that are changing, and I'm not saying it's a statue that can't be altered, but it's definitely just a development of what went before rather than any kind of break.”

While the  shadow of Wilmers looms large over the publication, not least because she has stayed on as a consulting editor, that hasn’t meant the organisation hasn’t been going through some big changes recently.

As with many news titles, and society more generally, the pandemic became a catalyst for innovation at the often stubbornly unchanging LRB. Events normally hosted in the LRB bookshop shifted online, book sales moved to a newly launched e-commerce arm (that has since moved on to selling everything from stationery to scarfs) and then there were podcasts.

“We hadn't had a regular podcast until the pandemic. And it sort of fell into place then,” says Spawls. “We had an occasional series of a very good podcast called close readings by Seamus Perry and Mark Ford in which they would look at a particular poet… During the pandemic, we made it more regular, and now we have a podcast after each issue, which talks about a piece in the issue with the writer.”

In some ways, the reverence for Wilmers is no surprise given how much the publication owes her, both figuratively and, as it turns out, literally.

The outlet shies away from discussing its bottom line but was reported by The Times to be £27m in debt to the Wilmers' family trust in 2010 , though Wilmers, an heiress to a fortune made in the fur trade, said she had no intention of recouping that debt.

The most recent Company House accounts suggest the company lost £4.6m in 2020, and £3.6m the year before that, though when we asked about those figures Doegar reiterated that “there was no intention to collect that debt”.

Picture: London Review of Books

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Something New: The “LRB” Turns 40

January 14, 2020   •   By Colin Marshall

london review of books reputation

London Review of Books: An Incomplete History

I knew this ambition would likely incur the unremitting hostility of the samurai of political correctness, whether of the right or the left, as well as the palpable disdain of newspaper editors who had convinced themselves that the way to win readers and improve circulation was to embrace the faux populism of the marketplace.

London Review of Books 4+

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Description.

The London Review of Books is the largest cultural literary magazine in Europe and has an unparalleled international reputation for long form literary journalism. Published every two weeks, each issue contains unique contributions by the world’s leading thinkers, scholars and writers on a range of subjects such as history, politics, philosophy, art, poetry, biography, opinion pieces, film and more. The LRB doesn’t just review books - it uses recently published books as a catalyst to interrogate and analyse world culture; the end point is a collection of independent, originally-crafted essays. The London Review of Books app is free to download and comes with a free preview issue. After that, auto-renewing subscriptions are £74.99/US $109.99 annually. To read issues from before your subscription began, you must pay for them individually at £3.99/US $5.99 per issue. Subscription and issue payment is charged to your iTunes Account at the confirmation of purchase. When you become a subscriber, you can download any issue published while your subscription is active. If your subscription lapses, you will still be able to read the issues published while you were an active subscriber. Tap the “Restore” button to make previously purchased issues available on your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. You can update or opt out of renewal for your subscription in your iTunes Store account settings. Privacy policy: https://www.lrb.co.uk/privacy Terms of use: https://www.lrb.co.uk/terms

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Bug fixes and performance improvements.

Ratings and Reviews

2.4K Ratings

I dont “like” to read on my phone

Or on a computer, really. I do plenty of it but w/o the patience i’ve learned w/ print. W/ patience comes focus, which goes on its merry way not tithering. A great app for reading when you’ve left your hard copy behind, which arrives promptly, probably before you knew it. The week or two behind i’m usually at w/ print (often longer or alrogether lost depending on fluctuations in my schedule) does not exist here. I’m as current as a reader in the UK. I haven’t tried printing from here, but maybe that’s something i would do w longer stories ive since recycled or that are from the archive. There is a “download” option for each issue. On my iphone, I’m sure I could. You are not going to get anything more here than what you came for. A rare thing indeed in this hypertechno, online world we’re in. A blessed thing indeed. Thanks,

Does not support active reading like the web site does

Why would the LRB deliver an otherwise solid mobile app, that doesn’t support annotations! Hopefully that is only temporary, because I enjoy reading much more when I can markup my copy with highlights and margin notes. Luckily, I can do so by generating a PDF of an article off the LRB’s web site, usually via the Safari web browser’s Markup command. Many PDF readers allow me to handwrite margin notes on a tablet, and highlight passages, names and expressions that spark my interest. I derive so much more pleasure and benefit from an article when I engage it actively like this. While it’s great that the LRB’s web version offers the capability, please support me in a future version of the app. Generating a good PDF of the article inside the app would be perfect, as I can then archive my annotations in my favorite note-taking app.

Great app but text sizing is a blunt instrument

This app functions really well and is very easy to use, and it is a wonderful addition particularly during the pandemic when paper copies arrive late or sometimes not at all. But the choice of font size needs some work. There are only three or four settings and the difference — on an iPad mini — between the smallest size and the next largest is comically large. The smallest size means about 39 lines of an average 10 words each on the screen. He next size up is 25 lines of an average of about 6-7 words per line. There really should be something in between.

App Privacy

The developer, LRB Limited , has not provided details about its privacy practices and handling of data to Apple. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

No Details Provided

The developer will be required to provide privacy details when they submit their next app update.

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