On Edith Piaf
Bee Wilson, 6 September 2024
In this free chapter from Complicated Women, Bee Wilson describes the ways that Edith Piaf’s life and art embodied the needs of her public, and how she became a symbol of postwar French resilience.
In this free chapter from Complicated Women, Bee Wilson describes the ways that Edith Piaf’s life and art embodied the needs of her public, and how she became a symbol of postwar French resilience.
In this free chapter from his LRB audiobook, Jonathan Rée looks at the life of Jean-Paul Sartre up to the publication of his first major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, in 1943.
The great auk was a flightless, populous and reportedly delicious bird, once found widely across the rocky outcrops of the North Atlantic. By the 1860s it was extinct, its decline sharpened by specimen...
What do Jane Austen, Simone de Beauvoir and Herodotus have in common? They all appear in three of this year’s Close Readings series, in which a pair of LRB contributors explore an area of literature...
The Belgrano affair reaches its climax as the stories of Narendra Sethia and Clive Ponting connect. The two whistleblowers appear in court and the diary makes its final journey.
Lieutenant Sethia is accused of a second crime: the theft of HMS Conqueror’s log books. Two journalists and the Serious Crime Squad try to hunt him down.
Armed with the diary, Tam Dalyell goes on the attack – but the cover-up continues. A second whistle-blower from within the Ministry of Defence is arrested for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
Lieutenant Sethia quits the navy and moves to the Caribbean. He thinks the Falklands War is behind him, but back in the UK, an eccentric, anti-war MP notices a discrepancy in the government’s account...
‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist...
In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account...
The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and...
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account...
To mark the publication of a new edition of Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, the hosted a discussion of Rose’s masterpiece and its legacy, featuring James Butler, Rebekah Howes and the former Archbishop...
Lauren Oyler is one of our rowdiest and sharpest literary critics, twice causing the LRB website to crash from too much traffic, and author of the novel Fake Accounts. No Judgement is her first collection...
Fernanda Eberstadt’s Bite Your Friends is both a history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, drawing on a cast of outrageous heroes including Diogenes, Saint Perpetua,...
When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a detective story, memoir and cultural history of Ireland’s...
David talks to Mark Ford and Seamus Perry, hosts of Political Poems, about what makes a great political poem. Can great poetry be ideological? How much does context matter? And is it possible to tell...
This week’s Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict.
This week’s Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen...
This week’s episode on the great political fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above...
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