London Review of Books
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Issue 47.18 is now online, featuring:

@erinmaglaque.bsky.social on Pico della Mirandola
Conor Gearty on human rights and the law
Thomas Laqueur on the cello
Jessica Olin on Amanda Knox
Colin Burrow on Muriel Spark
and David Runciman on the road to Brexit.

Read online at www.lrb.co.uk
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‘Pico della Mirandola’s speech was intended as high Renaissance performance art, but that’s not to say it was secular, humanist or modern – rather, it was profoundly weird.’

@erinmaglaque.bsky.social on the philosopher who wanted to be an angel: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Erin Maglaque · Thishereness: Pico in Purgatory
Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘Enoch Powell helped turn Britain’s relationship with Europe into an all-consuming struggle for the soul of the body politic. Nothing became more frightening than the idea that the shadow play might be the new reality.’

David Runciman on the road to Brexit: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
David Runciman · Down the Rabbit Hole: Britain’s Europe Problem
From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘According to the philosophical account Taylor draws on, the articulations of poetry are as fully capable of disclosing the existential significance of human life as the words of philosophers or saints.’

Stephen Mulhall on Charles Taylor’s ‘Cosmic Connections’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Stephen Mulhall · Self-Interpreting Animals
New linguistic articulations can reconfigure the way we make sense of our own feelings, thoughts and responses – our...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘Lorde offered a politics that dealt in the realities of survival as well as the necessity of defiance: she refused to give ground to white feminists or to a Black nationalism that assumed women’s subservience.’

@keeanga.bsky.social on Audre Lorde: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor · I do not have to be you: Audre Lorde’s Legacy
Lorde never had to persuade her comrades about a strategy, tactic or new idea, lose an argument in order to maintain a...
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‘Five musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic are thought to have taken their instruments to the camps or ghettos, where they played music before they were liquidated. Then there was silence.’

Thomas Laqueuer on Kate Kennedy’s ‘Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound’
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Thomas Laqueur · A Different Life: Can cellos remember?
Cellists and violinists in particular are haunted by the musicians who played their instruments before them and those...
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lrb.co.uk
‘Chinese Gen Z-ers don’t want their parents or colleagues to know what they say, watch or read in the virtual world. Plus, cyber violence is rife: who wants to be doxxed over a silly comment?’

Yun Sheng: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Yun Sheng · Short Cuts: China’s Gen Z
A passive-aggressive ‘lying flat’ attitude is easily dismissed as laziness, but Gen Z-ers have developed a...
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lrb.co.uk
‘In his entire life Flaubert never bought a newspaper from a kiosk and – almost incredibly – never went into a bookshop.’

Online early from the next issue – Julian Barnes on Flaubert and his publisher Michel Lévy: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Julian Barnes · Ouvriers de luxe: Author v. Publisher
Gustave Flaubert’s first three novels, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale, were all published by...
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lrb.co.uk
‘Amanda Knox comes across as thoughtful and well informed about the systemic factors affecting incarcerated people. Context upends many of the judgments the world has made.’

Jessica Olin on Knox’s memoir: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Jessica Olin · In the Multiverse: What Knox did next
A proud sci-fi and fantasy nerd, Amanda Knox inhabits the multiverse. She ‘fantasises about moving to a remote village...
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lrb.co.uk
‘Beneath it all lurks the scientists’ fear that they still don’t have a reliable way to tell if a seemingly complaisant, humanist AGI or ASI is deceiving them about its real values.’

@jamesmeek.bsky.social on the search for Artificial General Intelligence: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
James Meek · Computers that want things
For all the fluency and synthetic friendliness of public-facing AI chatbots like ChatGPT, it seems important to remember...
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lrb.co.uk
‘During the trial, as the prosecution’s patient parade of witnesses gave evidence, a new war broke out in Sudan, with the heirs of the Janjaweed, the Rapid Support Forces, rampaging through many of the same areas.’

Alex de Waal on Sudan and the ICC, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...
Alex de Waal | At the ICC
Last Monday, three judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague delivered their verdict on Ali Abdelrahman...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘The​ current members of the Supreme Court, ten men and two women, all of them white, seem to regard the Human Rights Act as an unwelcome remnant of a past era.’

In his final piece for the 𝘓𝘙𝘉, Conor Gearty writes on the Supreme Court’s reinterpretation of the HRA: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Conor Gearty · Unwelcome Remnant: Erasing the Human Rights Act
The Supreme Court is quietly editing the Human Rights Act out of existence. None of this is being done in secret – the...
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lrb.co.uk
‘Even before they took over, the Nazis had made clumsy efforts to get the Times to replace Ebbutt as its correspondent by suggesting to Lady Astor, whose family owned the paper, that he was a drunk.’

Patrick Cockburn on a journalist who saw the Nazi threat coming: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Patrick Cockburn · Diary: Interviewing Hitler
In August 1937, three German journalists were expelled from Britain for suspected espionage. Retaliation was a...
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‘Flaubert had the highest conception of Art and the lowest conception of Business. “I do not see the connection,” he wrote, “between a five-franc piece and an idea.”’

Julian Barnes on Flaubert and his publisher, online early from the next issue: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Julian Barnes · Ouvriers de luxe: Author v. Publisher
Gustave Flaubert’s first three novels, Madame Bovary, Salammbô and L’Éducation sentimentale, were all published by...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘Norman Ebbutt was one of the few protagonists in the great controversy over appeasement, which raged for decades, who did not write a book about it.’

Patrick Cockburn on a journalist expelled from Germany for exposing the Nazi threat: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Patrick Cockburn · Diary: Interviewing Hitler
In August 1937, three German journalists were expelled from Britain for suspected espionage. Retaliation was a...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘Voltaire described him as “a blind man guided by blind masters”. Pico della Mirandola was a scholastic, and he defended medieval university philosophy against the eloquent, self-consciously innovating humanists who were his friends and lovers.’

Erin Maglaque: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Erin Maglaque · Thishereness: Pico in Purgatory
Pico’s Oration contravenes the very idea of human possibility that we think the Renaissance is about – yet we think...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘Why did the belief in British exceptionalism persist? Some of it could be put down to delusions of grandeur. There was a feeling that Europe needed us more than we needed them.’

David Runciman on the road to Brexit: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
David Runciman · Down the Rabbit Hole: Britain’s Europe Problem
From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘Taken together, these three volumes amount to an exercise in practical reasoning – a highly specific interpretation of the present of Western culture as the outcome of a series of conceptual transitions in the past.’

Stephen Mulhall on Charles Taylor’s philosophy: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Stephen Mulhall · Self-Interpreting Animals
New linguistic articulations can reconfigure the way we make sense of our own feelings, thoughts and responses – our...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘When we hear Americans saying, we just don't have the ability to shape the behavior of the Israeli government or anyone else, I think this episode puts at least somewhat of a lie to that claim.’

Robert Malley and @adamshatz.bsky.social on the podcast: www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and...
Podcast: Adam Shatz and Robert Malley · Lessons from the Peace Process
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lrb.co.uk
‘Some librarians were fired; some received death threats. At one point in the film, a grandfather turns up at a school meeting with a gun to tell the library supporters: “We know what you do. We know where you live.”’

Anna Aslanyan on book bans and censorship: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...
Anna Aslanyan | The Censor’s Scissors
John Heartfield was forced to leave Germany in 1933. Even before the Nazis put him on their hit list, his art had caused...
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lrb.co.uk
‘This is one of the recurring pleasures of Spike Lee’s films. He likes to mix genres and return to places and people. I’m thinking now particularly of “Da 5 Bloods”, but similar effects occur in much, perhaps most, of his work.’

Michael Wood watches ‘Highest 2 Lowest’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Michael Wood · At the Movies: ‘Highest 2 Lowest’
Highest 2 Lowest is a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), which is a loose adaptation of Ed McBain’s...
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lrb.co.uk
you are finding a way by losing
the path and refinding
a path in what the other walkers
earlier said how had we never found
that tarn how
had we let the world dissolve
into the obvious life
we were living

‘Clearing’, a poem by Maureen N. McLane: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Maureen N. McLane · Poem: ‘Clearing’
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‘Photographic negatives are fragile, prone to scratching, fading and decay, and many of Peter’s are well over sixty years old.’

Ben Campbell on his father’s photographs of London in the early sixties: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Ben Campbell · In the Shoebox: Peter’s Snapshots
The snapshots in my father’s book were taken during his first three years in London, after he emigrated from New...
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lrb.co.uk
‘The conclusion of the trial is like a beam of light from another galaxy. In the twenty years since the ICC opened its investigation, no other culprit for the crimes in Darfur has been arrested.’

Alex de Waal on Sudan and the ICC, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/oc...
Alex de Waal | At the ICC
Last Monday, three judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague delivered their verdict on Ali Abdelrahman...
www.lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
‘While Macron brought together the supporters and Le Pen the adversaries of neoliberal globalisation, Mélenchon forged a more fragile coalition of the various groups who want a different kind of globalisation.’

David Todd on Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
David Todd · Parable of the Parakeets: Mélenchon’s Ambitions
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral...
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