Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor. ...

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

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

Ionce witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered ...

Wynne Godley was by turns a professional oboist, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an economist at the Treasury and a director of the Royal Opera House. Yet at thirty he found himself ‘living ...

Many TV shows are set in hospitals, but fewer novels, at least ones that take place outside the psychiatric ward. Hospitals make for good drama: the path to diagnosis is a mystery plot with inherent ...

tipped from the picture by its tilting fields. I was now outside the work watching the shadow who walked beside me indicate that I should return. Where to? The tangled woods. Brief figures rose beside ...

In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, Captain Tom Moore decided to try to raise £1000 for the NHS by walking up and down his garden in Bedfordshire a hundred times before his hundredth birthday ...

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 ...

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 ...