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Early Modern News
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse a…
1 month, 4 weeks ago
On Politics: Mandelson and the Private Life of Power
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of…
2 months ago
Jessica Mitford’s Handbag
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to…
2 months, 1 week ago
On Politics: A New Age of Protest in Iran
The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic ex…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Buckley, MAGA’s Patron Saint
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White Hou…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
On Politics: Venezuela and the Trump Doctrine
In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in …
3 months ago
Will the AI bubble burst?
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient…
3 months, 1 week ago
What Don Quixote Knew
In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and…
3 months, 2 weeks ago
What Dickens taught Mariah Carey
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when …
3 months, 3 weeks ago
Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ amoral?
Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848. As Patricia Lockwood said in an episode of Close Readings, there is evidence that Brontë was writing a second …
3 months, 3 weeks ago