London Review of Books

London Review of Books
Title	London Review of Books
Category	Literary magazine
Frequency	Fortnightly
Founded	1979
Country	United Kingdom
Based	London
Language	English

London Review of Books The London Review of Books is a British literary and intellectual magazine noted for long-form essays, reviews, and cultural commentary. Founded during a printers' strike, it evolved into a major forum intersecting literature, history, politics, and the arts, featuring contributions by novelists, historians, and public intellectuals. The magazine frequently engages with contemporary debates involving figures and institutions across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and beyond.

History

The magazine emerged in 1979 amid the closure of The Times' literary pages and against the backdrop of industrial action involving the National Union of Journalists and trade disputes that affected Fleet Street. Early issues responded to events such as the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the legacies of World War II, and debates surrounding Margaret Thatcher's premiership. In the 1980s and 1990s its pages addressed crises including the Falklands War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, while engaging historians who worked on topics like the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Trials, and decolonisation struggles involving India and Algeria. Into the 21st century the magazine covered interventions such as the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021), and diplomatic processes like the Oslo Accords and the Iran nuclear deal framework.

Editorial and Contributors

Editorial leadership has included figures drawn from the worlds of criticism, academia, and publishing with links to institutions such as University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, and the British Library. Contributors have ranged from novelists associated with Faber and Faber and Bloomsbury Publishing to historians affiliated with Harvard University, Yale University, and the University of Chicago. Regular and occasional writers have included names connected to works on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Mary Shelley, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, Homer, Virgil, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Rabbi Akiva and commentators associated with policy debates around Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-sung, Aung San Suu Kyi, Saddam Hussein, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yasser Arafat, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt (duplicate appearance due to frequent citation), and cultural figures linked to Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Leonard Bernstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Simon Schama, Niall Ferguson, Mary Beard, Simon Leys, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood and poets associated with Poetry Society.

Content and Themes

The magazine publishes long reviews and essays on literature, history, international affairs, and the visual and performing arts, often intersecting scholarship from Cambridge University Press or Oxford University Press authors. Thematic coverage has included imperial histories like those of the British Empire and Ottoman Empire, revolutions such as the French Revolution and Russian Revolution, and conflicts from the American Civil War to the Spanish Civil War. It has run sustained discussions of intellectual movements including Modernism, Romanticism, Postmodernism, and debates sparked by texts such as The Communist Manifesto, The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, The Origin of Species, Culture and Imperialism, Orientalism, and key legal and political documents like the Magna Carta and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Profiles and criticism explore the work of novelists, poets, historians, philosophers, filmmakers, playwrights, composers, and visual artists.

Publication and Distribution

Published fortnightly from offices in London, the magazine is produced by a staff working with printers and distributors connected to the publishing trade on Fleet Street and in the City of Westminster. Subscriptions circulate across the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia, and parts of Asia and Africa, reaching readers in cities such as New York City, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi, Cape Town, Sydney and Toronto. Institutional readership includes university libraries like those of Princeton University, Columbia University, King's College London, University of Edinburgh, and research institutes such as the Royal Society and the British Museum.

Reception and Influence

The magazine has influenced public intellectual life and academic debates, cited in discussions involving Nobel Prize in Literature, Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, Turner Prize, and awards from institutions like the Royal Society of Literature. Its essays have shaped commentary on events such as the Suez Crisis, the Iran–Iraq War, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War, and have been referenced in parliamentary debates at Westminster and policy discussions in capitals including Washington, D.C. and Brussels. Commentators from journalism outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Economist, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement have repeatedly engaged with its pages.

Controversies and Criticism

The magazine has faced controversies over polemical essays and the positions of contributors on conflicts involving Israel–Palestine conflict, the Iraq War, and interventions by NATO. Debates have involved accusations of political bias when discussing figures like Tony Blair or George W. Bush, or when reassessing historical actors such as Joseph Stalin or Vladimir Lenin. Critics from outlets like The Daily Mail and Spectator commentators have sometimes challenged its editorial judgments, while defenders have invoked standards of literary criticism and historical argumentation as practiced by academics at University College London and King's College London.

Category:Literary magazines published in the United Kingdom