‘Think of a loincloth as an act of diplomacy: the malo loloa, a long loincloth made of barkcloth, was a metaphor for Hawaii forming alliances.’
Susannah Clapp visits the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Peter Mandelson tended his own mythology and influence over the party, of course. But many were attracted to the politics of pure means that he represented, irrespective of ends.’
@piercepenniless.bsky.social on Mandelson and Epstein.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Countries that claim to oppose unprovoked wars have, with the commendable exception of Spain, welcomed this one.’
@tomstevenson.bsky.social on the war on Iran:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘American and Israeli leaders give conflicting accounts of their goals, and it’s perhaps a mistake to ascribe a conceptual objective to incoherent, raging violence.’
@tomstevenson.bsky.social on Iran, online early from our next issue.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘My father and I went to hand in our empty cylinder and returned with eight kilos of cooking gas. Other men were carrying cylinders home with children walking beside them as if they were guarding treasure.’
Hassan Ayman Herzallah in Gaza, new on the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
‘If we’re going to help patients with medically unexplained symptoms, we need to improve our understanding of what is really going on so that we can identify appropriate treatments.’
Paul Taylor (@paul3548.bsky.social) on the diagnosis debate.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Unless the US and Mexican governments cut the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación’s cash flow through the banking system and networks of legitimate front business, even without El Mencho, the organisation has little reason for concern.’
Forrest Hylton on the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
‘The enduring liberal fantasy that Melania Trump is unwilling, trapped, in need of rescue, #FreeMelania, has never squared with the most rigorous reporting about her.’
@deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Trump’s First Lady.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘In Davis’s more expansive (and to my mind most compelling) stories, feeling does not so much erupt within routine as amplify its curvature.’
David Trotter on why Lydia Davis writes.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘“Once the agreements are signed, your divorce will be officially affirmed. You cannot take it back. Do you understand?” We did. If only the marriage registration clerk had offered me a similar warning.’
Long Ling’s Beijing divorce:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘If the Picts were not a cohesive ethnic group but a heterogeneous coalition of Iron Age tribes, as some scholars now think, what gave rise to the Scythian story? Given the absence of Pictish texts, we may never know.’
Barbara Newman on Britain’s origin stories.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Eight kilos of gas did not change our reality. It did not end the war or remove the fear. But it brought back something we were close to forgetting: what it feels like to live a normal day, even if only for a few hours.’
Hassan Ayman Herzallah in Gaza, from the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
‘Traditional fabrics bring unifying stories. The most distinctive Hawaiian material, kapa or barkcloth, was wonderfully versatile, used for skirts, bedsheets and, according to one story, the sky.’
Susannah Clapp visits the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
There are just a couple days left to apply to come work with us at the Bookshop.
More details about the position here: www.lrb.co.uk/pages/standa...
‘El Mencho’s death looks less like a change of direction than business as usual. Escalating violence is expected.’
Forrest Hylton on the killing of the head of Mexico’s Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, from the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
‘What exactly is this line of decorum that Caravaggio was crossing? Was it because he used ordinary people?’
@erinmaglaque.bsky.social joins @moonjets.bsky.social on the podcast to discuss what made Caravaggio so unnerving:
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...
‘The embassy, protected by diplomatic immunity, became a vital hub for disseminating Protestant works in the Veneto and for supplying James’s court in London with extensive information on the background to the Interdict Crisis.’
Clare Jackson on Henry Wotton.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘If Trump’s intention was to remove Khamenei from the political landscape, he may instead have fixed him in it, recast in the eyes of his devotees as a figure of sacrifice rather than failure.’
@eskandarsadeghi.bsky.social on the US war on Iran, from the blog.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
‘One way of understanding the story is that the first urban society inspired an unneighbourly fantasy of mass murder.’
Alexander Bevilacqua on attempts to explain Noah, the ark and the Flood.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Will democracy survive as a 21st-century form of government, or are we watching it slide towards bankruptcy?
On 11 March, David Runciman (@ppfideas.bsky.social), Lyse Doucet, Thant Myint-U and Christopher Clark will discuss the slow death of democracy.
Tickets: www.tickettailor.com/events/londo...
‘We are drawn to Caravaggio because he reflects back to us something about ourselves that we hardly understand.’
@erinmaglaque.bsky.social on Caravaggio’s clothes.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘His widespread image in popular culture as an excitingly shady gay martyr came to replace the 17th century’s sporadic treatments of his short life as the cautionary tale of a blasphemer justly punished.’
Michael Dobson on a new study of Christopher Marlowe.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
cataloguing stupidity
stupid, perennial, this
year a what year, heavy
rains, get used to it, new skies,
old clouds, project your feeling
on the sky, watch it
move, shifter, morphology
eluding a bounding
line, where is justice
From ‘Daybook’, a poem by Maureen N. McLane
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘The test for Huntington’s disease has been available for thirty years but fewer than 20 per cent of the at-risk population have chosen to be tested – the majority presumably prefer hope to certainty.’
Paul Taylor (@paul3548.bsky.social) on ovediagnosis.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘Trapped in his own illusions about quantifiable superiority and winnable nuclear wars, Zbigniew Brzezinski failed to realise that what he saw as a hoax was a major transatlantic movement against the nuclear arms race.’
Jackson Lears on Brzezinski’s Russophobia.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
On the occasion of Britney Spears' DUI, it's worth reading this piece by Chal Ravens in the @lrb.co.uk which points out that if you turn a child into a sex-and-money machine, this enormous cruelty is going to fuck them up for life.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘She claims to speak French, German and Italian, but her encounters with French, German and Italian speakers suggest otherwise.’
@deborahfriedell.bsky.social on Melania Trump.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
‘The Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, which El Mencho built, imports more weapons and military hardware, kidnaps and traffics more people and has a larger presence in the licit economy than any of its rivals.’
Forrest Hylton on Mexico after Mencho, from the blog: www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
‘Mandelson’s actions amounted to conscious betrayals of his country in order to protect and impress the powerful. Whether or not he is successfully prosecuted for misconduct in public office, that betrayal will remain his political epitaph.’
James Butler:
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
On Tuesday 17 March, @lrb.co.uk contributing editor Jeremy Harding will be in the Bookshop to discuss ANALOGUE AFRICA, his new book on anti-colonialism in African art and film, with Kevin Okoth.
Tickets here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1980462117...
