The London Review

London Review of Books: An Incomplete History invites readers behind the scenes for the first time, reproducing a fascinating selection of artefacts and ephemera from the paper's archives, personal collections and forgotten filing cabinets. Letters, notebooks, drawings, postcards, fieldnotes and typescripts, many of them never previously published, bring an idiosyncratic slice of Bloomsbury's heritage to life. Fragments by legendary contributors - from Alan Bennett to Angela Carter, Oliver Sacks to Edward Said, Ted Hughes to Christopher Hitchens, Richard Rorty to Jenny Diski, plus the occasional prime minister or Nobel prize-winner - are contextualised with captions and backstories by LRB writers and editors. The result is an intimate account of forty years of intellectual life, which sheds new light on great careers, famous incidents and some of the history going on in the background: a testament to the power of print - and well-edited sentences - in the new information age.

Erudite, witty and often controversial, The London Review of Books informs and entertains its readers with a fortnightly dose of the best and liveliest of all things cultural. This anthology brings together some of the most memorable pieces from recent years, includes Alan Bennett’s Diary, Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton’s presidency, Terry Castle’s hotly-debated reading of Jane Austen’s letters, Jerry Fodor taking issue with Richard Dawkins on evolution, Victor Kiernan on treason, Jenny Diski musing on death, Stephen Frears’ adventures in Hollywood, Linda Colley on Nancy Reagan, Frank Kermode on Paul de Man and much much more.

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

With original artworks throughout, an extraordinary fusion of memoir and artistic biography from the acclaimed artist and author of Self-Portrait. Dearest Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, “Time is a strange substance” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how. Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John’s reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John’s life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public’s reception of their work. Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists’ work), and a writer/artist’s daybook, describing Paul’s first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband’s diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory—the artist at present—and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.

A New Statesman Book of the Year London. A city apart. Inimitable. Or so it once seemed. Spiralling from the outer limits of the Overground to the pinnacle of the Shard, Iain Sinclair encounters a metropolis stretched beyond recognition. The vestiges of secret tunnels, the ghosts of saints and lost poets lie buried by developments, the cycling revolution and Brexit. An electrifying final odyssey, The Last London is an unforgettable vision of the Big Smoke before it disappears into the air of memory.

I've divorced better men than you. And worn more expensive shoes than these. So don't think placing this ad is the biggest comedown I've ever had to make. Sensitive F, 34. Employed in publishing? Me too. Stay the hell away. Man on the inside seeks woman on the outside who likes milling around hospitals guessing the illnesses of out-patients. 30-35. Leeds. They Call Me Naughty Lola is a testament to the creativity and humor that can still be found among men and women longing for love and allergic to the concepts of Internet and speed dating. Here is an irresistible collection of the most brilliant and often absurd personal ads from the world's funniest -- and most erudite -- lonely-hearts column. The ads have been called "surreal haikus of the heart," and in an age of false advertising, the men and women who write them are hindered neither by high expectations nor by positivism of any kind. And yet, while hopes of finding a suitable mate remain low, the column has produced a handful of marriages, many friendships, and at least one divorce. Here are the young, old, fat, bald, healthy, ill, rich, and poor hoping that they can find true love, or at the very least, someone to call them Naughty Lola.

This is London in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers, witch-doctors and sex workers. This is London in the voices of Arabs, Afghans, Nigerians, Poles, Romanians and Russians. This is London as you've never seen it before. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2016 Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage 2019 'An eye-opening investigation into the hidden immigrant life of the city' Sunday Times 'Full of nuggets of unexpected information about the lives of others . . . It recalls the journalism of Orwell' Financial Times 'Ben Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets' The Economist

‘London is a giant kaleidoscope, which is forever turning. Take your eye off it for more than a moment and you’re lost.’ Robert Elms has seen his beloved city change beyond all imagining. London in his lifetime has morphed from a piratical, bomb-scarred playground, to a swish cosmopolitan metropolis. Motorways driven through lost communities, accents changing, skyscrapers appearing. Yet still it remains to him the greatest place on earth. Elms takes us back through time and place to myriad Londons. He is our guide through a place that has seen scientific experiments conducted in subterranean lairs and a small community declare itself an independent nation; a place his great-great-grandfather made the Elms’ home over a century ago and a city that has borne witness to world-changing events.