Early Modern News
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under fifteen kilometres pe...
18 Feb 45min
On Politics: Mandelson and the Private Life of Power
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This is among ...
11 Feb 1h 6min
Jessica Mitford’s Handbag
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long aft...
4 Feb 50min
On Politics: A New Age of Protest in Iran
The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic executed thousands of leftists and other dissidents. ...
28 Jan 57min
Buckley, MAGA’s Patron Saint
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder tha...
21 Jan 47min
On Politics: Venezuela and the Trump Doctrine
In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in Latin America. Yet in this case, Trump’s justificat...
14 Jan 1h 1min
Will the AI bubble burst?
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens ne...
7 Jan 54min
What Don Quixote Knew
In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first e...
31 Des 20251h 5min
