Biography & Memoir
What I Saw at the Movies
Leo Robson
Jean Epstein compared going to a movie to entering a state of hypnosis, an aesthetic experience that ‘modifies the nervous system’ much more than reading does. And it would be perverse to deny that watching the dead speak or past actions embalmed in an eternal present tense plays some role in what we find comforting about movies.
John Lewis fights for freedom
Randall Kennedy
John Lewis was at the heart of the protests in the early 1960s which transformed race relations in the United States. He participated in the sit-ins of 1960 in which black students (and a few white . . .
Ruthless Cecil Rhodes
Michael Ledger-Lomas
It is hard to look at the frontispiece of the first edition of Olive Schreiner’s short novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). Titled ‘photograph’, it shows three dead African men hanging . . .
What Knox did next
Jessica Olin
Almost twenty years have passed since Amanda Knox, an American exchange student in Perugia, was arrested for the murder of her British housemate, Meredith Kercher, and it is nearly impossible, at this . . .
Muriel Spark’s Wickedness
Colin Burrow
You can learn a lot about a person from the way they react to the death of a pet. The norm: uncontrollable sobbing, then mythologising its wonders and uniqueness. Perhaps after a few weeks you begin . . .
Beware the man whose handwriting sways like a reed in the wind
Anne Carson,6 March 2025
This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me.
Diary: When I Met the Pope
Patricia Lockwood,30 November 2023
The invitation said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason, instructs. ‘He has to be the whitest. And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.’
Always the Same Dream: Princess Margaret
Ferdinand Mount,4 January 2018
Only the hardest heart would repress a twitch of sympathy. To live on the receiving end of so much gush and so much abuse, to be simultaneously spoilt rotten and hopelessly infantilised, how well would any of us stand up to it?
Desperately Seeking Susan: remembering Susan Sontag
Terry Castle,17 March 2005
At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. Whenever she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp.
Memoirs of a Pet Lamb
David Sylvester,5 July 2001
I cannot recall the crucial incident itself, can only remember how I cringed when my parents told me about it, proudly, some years later, when I was about nine or ten. We had gone to a tea-shop on boat-race day where a lady had kindly asked whether I was Oxford or Cambridge. I had answered: ‘I’m a Jew.’
A Feeling for Ice
Jenny Diski,2 January 1997
I am not entirely content with the degree of whiteness in my life. My bedroom is white; white walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds. It’s the best I could do.
The Old Devil and his wife
Lorna Sage,7 October 1993
Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path, and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his.
Too Close to the Bone
Allon White,4 May 1989
Faust, despairing of all philosophies, may yet drain a marsh or rescue some acres from the sea.
The Raphael Question
Lawrence Gowing,15 March 1984
When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...
Collections
Podcasts & Videos
Magda’s Boy: How George Szirtes invented his mother
Anthony Wilks,3 November 2025
Anthony Wilks visits poet George Szirtes to find out about the story of Szirtes’ mother, Magda, a Hungarian photographer who survived two concentration camps and escaped Budapest for England with her...
More Biography & Memoir in theLRB
I do not have to be you: Audre Lorde’s Legacy
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,9 October 2025
Lorde never had to persuade her comrades about a strategy, tactic or new idea, lose an argument in order to maintain a relationship or undergo any of the tricky experiences that make politics the complicated...
Professor Heathrow: Asa Briggs says yes
Neal Ascherson,9 October 2025
Asa Briggs used sweeping educational change to increase equality in England. He helped to make history, as well as writing it. Today, as universities falter and plutocratic inequality towers over Asa’s...
Diary: Interviewing Hitler
Patrick Cockburn,9 October 2025
In August 1937, three German journalists were expelled from Britain for suspected espionage. Retaliation was a legitimate reason to get rid of Norman Ebbutt, and he was served his expulsion order by the...
After Martha
Paul Laity,25 September 2025
For the hospital, and for the NHS, it was a closed case, another preventable death: medicine is imperfect, such things happen. I couldn’t accept that. Looking back, I was setting the immeasurable private...
Devotion to the Cut: Gertrude Stein makes it plain
Adam Thirlwell,25 September 2025
Stein loved the idea that writing might have esoteric meanings but that those meanings would be only faintly perceived by the abstract reader, that a text could simultaneously be plain while explaining...
Diary: Two Cultures of Denunciation
Sheila Fitzpatrick,25 September 2025
From the MAGA perspective, snitching is the pejorative liberal word for the exercise of grassroots democracy needed to keep bureaucrats honest and put phoneys from the ‘woke’ intelligentsia in their...
Beaverosity: Biography of a Biography
Seamus Perry,11 September 2025
Richard Ellmann saw himself as emulating Joyce: the main job of the biographer was less a matter of ‘observing’ than of ‘ferreting’, which was also the word he used to describe ‘Joyce’s habit...
Dance in the Rain: Sturgeon comes out swinging
Dani Garavelli,11 September 2025
In the de-Sturgeonisation process that took place in the wake of her resignation, the narrative was rewritten. Her relatability, gravitas and high approval ratings were forgotten; her managerialism, insularity...
Diary: Out Birding
Oliver Whang,11 September 2025
Many birders spend long days in nature looking for an example of a particular species, and then, on finding it, do nothing. They just jot something down, or maybe take a photograph. This makes their fervour,...
Lunch with Mussolini: Ferrari Speeds Ahead
Thomas Jones,14 August 2025
I’d been told in no uncertain terms at the ‘technical briefing’, even if you think you’re a good driver, even if you passed your test thirty years ago and have more than a million kilometres of...
On Hallie Flanagan
Susannah Clapp,14 August 2025
From 1935 to 1939, Flanagan ran the most extraordinary of stage ventures. The Federal Theatre Project, set up under FDR’s New Deal to give work to unemployed theatre practitioners, produced more than...
Diary: Back to the Rectory
Patricia Lockwood,14 August 2025
It was our first visit to Kansas City since before the election and the rectory seemed to have grown smaller, darker, dingier. The Trump flag hanging in the alcove where we used to smoke with the seminarian;...
Through the Trapdoor: Roger Penrose’s Puzzles
Steven Shapin,26 June 2025
Stephen Hawking may have been a genius, but ‘Roger Penrose’s insights seem to stem from some superhuman life-form’; his mathematics has something ‘magical’ about it. His scientific credentials...
Agent of Influence: Christopher Hill’s Interests
Stefan Collini,22 May 2025
Christopher Hill devoted his attention almost exclusively to 17th-century England; he wrote far more about intellectual and religious history than political history; he re-created the world of those who...
Short Cuts: On Pope Francis
James Butler,8 May 2025
Francis’s continual emphasis on mercy – ‘the first attribute of God’ – explains his papal choices more clearly than the progressive/conservative heuristic. It is the reason he wanted a church...
I stab and stab: Helen Garner’s Diaries
Anne Enright,8 May 2025
The diaries filled me with nostalgia for all the bollocks we had to listen to back in the day; the interminable wrangle about whether women could even do ... um ... art, which in those days was a concept...
Red Pants on Sundays: On Albert Barnes
Julian Barnes,8 May 2025
You did not need to have met Albert Barnes for him to take against you. In late 1927 Ford Madox Ford, then in New York, telegraphed for permission to visit the foundation. Barnes cabled back: ‘Would...
Kippers and Champagne: Barclay and Barclay
Daniel Cohen,3 April 2025
The story of the Barclay brothers’ rise is ‘the story of modern Britain’, and they were certainly creatures of the 1980s, with their highly leveraged takeovers of old, lumbering companies they would...
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