For the Kims, nuclear weapons have never been an end in themselves; they are an insurance policy against attack by their powerful and proximate enemies. Until about seven years ago, North Korea repeatedly showed its willingness to trade its nuclear arsenal for convincing US security guarantees. Washington’s refusal to recognise and engage with this is a collective failure of its last four presidents.

The West can play at being universal, seeing itself as the only ‘civilisation’ and basing itself on metrics of modernisation or democratisation or simply wealth, but if the core appears threatened it snaps back to its original, exclusive formation, as the superior civilisation among several. Various nations have claimed to be its leader but the central drama of the West has been its diet: which nations it has chosen to keep out, and which it has swallowed whole.

The judges might argue that the Court of Appeal is a court of review, whose job is simply to assess whether a conviction is unsafe, and that they are not required to assess wider responsibility. But the court is not consistent in this approach. Time and again it makes a judgment on the basis of its own assessment of fresh evidence.

Academic life is full of churn. The world changes; younger scholars are seized by new questions and, as they hare down new paths, challenge their elders’ work or leave them behind. Those elders might read that as the decline of ‘standards’ but it really isn’t; it’s just the decline of their own preoccupations and authority. 

Radical change was a function of rivalry between city-states. Athens and Thebes, close neighbours, developed very different polities with different cultures, dialects and alphabets, and Athenian drama loved to use gruesome Theban myths to offer an anti-type to Athens. Religious festivals in honour of different patron deities varied between cities.

Hoopoe is the thingWith feathers, and a crest,Or else a thing with feathers,Striped wings, and tawny breast.*(I never saw a hoopoe –Unless I was alone –Except some interloperTook out...

In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It is our national and/or racial identity that is being fractured. What underlies the sense of affront is the assumption that the ‘people of England’ are, as it were, a settled question, that the days of large-scale movements belong to the past, or ought to.

‘I was absolutely overwhelmed by jazz because I knew that was America,’ Model wrote. ‘And that was something I really wanted to photograph.’ The Jazz Pictures shows her feeling for the musicians, the fans, and the world they were trying to create in a country still defined by segregation, both formal and informal.

‘Almost everything is imitation,’ Voltaire wrote in one of the French editions of Lettres philosophiques. Books were like a borrowed flame: ‘We go to a neighbour to get the embers, light the fire when we return home and then pass it on to others; it belongs to everyone.’ For the truffle-hunting positivists of the Lanson era, there could be no more frustrating attitude.

Over the course of 24 novels and 87 years, Anita Brookner achieved many dislocations of selfhood and may have become more and more like the people she dreamed into life. It’s a novelist’s fate, not so much that their characters are like them but that they become their characters.

My father, Peter Campbell, took these photographs of Anita Brookner for the LRB in 1982. The pictures must have been taken in Brookner’s office at the Courtauld: in a couple of them shelves of files are visible through the safety glass window in the door. I wonder if the Courtauld has any spaces as shabby as this any more.

‘What people eat and how they serve it’ fascinated Colwin, and not only because (as she once noted) she’d learned about the cultural significance of ‘daily things’ in Anthropology 101. Her sharp and nuanced descriptions of eating, preparing and shopping for meals are psychologically and socially revealing, but remarks like ‘an éclair or two promotes clear thinking’ are also their own reward.

Whistler has not had a major retrospective in Europe in the last thirty years. The Tate show should have been an excellent opportunity for a reappraisal. It claims to bring together his ‘world-famous paintings’ alongside less well-known works, but in truth there are too few of the former.

We are left, a third of the way through The Disappearers, with a feeling of absolute outrage, when outrage is no more than anger in the key of helplessness. Outrage leads nowhere; violence freezes time for the victim; self-hatred paralyses every other emotion. These are all problems for a long narrative that needs to find a dynamism distinct from local intensity. 

Schoenberg looked backward and forward. In his commitment to perpetuating the Austro-German canon, he drew on the compositional techniques of his predecessors: the counterpoint of Bach, the classical forms of Mozart, the motivic working of Brahms, the tonal expansion of Wagner. And he self-consciously progressed towards what is now referred to as atonality.

The point about the microphone as a visual aid is a minor one. Behind it lies a more fundamental question. What does the thing exist to do? Sometimes the significance of a device becomes fully apparent only when read against the grain of the history of its technical development. 

There are reasons to value Paris-Underground. Etta Shiber’s account of life in Nazi-occupied Paris shows a vivid domestic world seldom seen in comparable memoirs. She describes the depredations and injustices of the Occupation, not least the looting of apartments by the Nazis. She recounts the parting shot of one angry French worker to the ransacking German soldiers: ‘Wait a minute! You’ve forgotten to take the nails!’

Britain has private ownership while making the state responsible for planning via subsidies. The result is a zombie system, a muddled and dysfunctional hybrid of state and market, with the benefits of neither and the costs of both. The regulatory architecture behind this is the most complex in the world.

A couple of days before I arrived in Predappio, I read that Hitler’s birthplace in Austria had been compulsorily purchased and turned into a police station. Mussolini’s birthplace is now a museum, while the Villa Carpena, his house 15 km away in Forlì, has been turned into a Casa dei Ricordi or ‘house of memories’.

The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 48 No. 17 (11 September 2026)