As Seamus Heaney’s fame grew, and ‘the N-word’ (Nobel) added lustre, he attracted intrusive commentary. There were ‘feminist uppercuts’ and ‘Marxist flesh wounds’ from the academics. The mid-life letters are genial but often let slip how wary and frazzled he felt ..read more

So many of Hisham Matar’s themes – trauma and vulnerability, the question of how to oppose authoritarianism, the experience of exile – seem very contemporary. Yet there is something profoundly conservative about My Friends ..read more

Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t think of another word to describe them ..read more

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 46 No. 8 (Friday 12 April 2024 ..read more

As the shadow of the Moon swept across the surrounding cornfields, engulfing the crowd that had gathered to watch the total solar eclipse, we were transported, briefly, to a place unlike anywhere else on Earth. The transition from partial to total eclipse is as sudden and shocking as a jump cut in a horror film ..read more

Like good theatre, Patrick deWitt's fiction is full of dialogue, quick, eventful, nimble. Then there is the life-altering incident, which is always a monologue delivered centre-stage and projected to the cheap seats in the back ..read more

Inuit art as we know it – though often assumed to be an ancient cultural tradition – is a product of the 20th century. Its imagery, however, is a complex fusion of old and new, of the pre-colonial and post-colonial, of the human world and the spirit world, of interior and exterior life. In Inuit culture, the seen and the unseen co-exist ..read more

In​ 1831, a young French aristocrat, charged by his government with reporting on American prison conditions, spent the year travelling in the United States. Alexis de Tocqueville’s ..read more

The Pratt-Smith case is in many ways representative: the offence took place between two ordinary men in an ordinary place at an ordinary time of day and was witnessed by members of the public, who decided to involve the law. And yet, it was far from being the case that the law was always out for blood: significantly more homosexual offences were dismissed, or treated with fines, or noted only as ‘known to the police’, than were translated into committals ..read more

In an environment in which binary thinking prevailed, atheism was a potent ‘other’ against which devout Christianity defined itself. At its most extreme, this line of interpretation has led to the suggestion that if atheism had not existed it would have had to be invented.  ..read more