Daniel Defoe , in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains.

It was noisy in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor.* I worked upstairs in the composing room where the ...

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as ...

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as I did a few weeks ago. A former journalist turned fixer told me there were ‘no ...

The world has been Surrealist for a hundred years, though the adjective that people turn to in trying to describe ...

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’.

Alan Bennett reads from his short story, ‘The Uncommon Reader’, first published in the LRB in 2007, in which HM the Queen drifts accidentally into reading – and reading subversively at that – when her ...

The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation last month, five days after the publication of an ...

Jefferson Hope’s condition seems similar to the one that threatens the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, ...

For Mendoza , the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when ...