When a friend behaves weirdly, it’s not unreasonable to call them on it—true? For decades, we admired the London Review of Books for the calibre of its reviews. Like it or not, whatever your politics, the LRB defined the country’s intellectual agenda every fortnight.
LRB writers added such depth of context to the writings of others that, reading them, one felt momentarily admitted to a superior club, better equipped to understand the mysteries of a challenging world. Inevitably there was a left-wing bias in the writings, with the magazine’s regular contributors and twenty or so “contributing editors” bringing new interpretations and fresh evidence that outpaced the lazy thinking and old truths of more conventional magazines. And that felt leftish.
All of that now seems very much in the past. Something has happened at the London Review of Books that makes one warier of its contributors and less confident about their judgements. The magazine’s once unrivalled openness has been replaced by a small-mindedness in which the rigour of proper argumentation in now accompanied by labelling, dog whistles and taunts. Fun for those who like that sort of thing; dishonourable if you hold the LRB to a higher account.
So limited has the LRB become in what it will examine openly that it seems to be suffering from locked-in syndrome. This is most apparent in its handling of the Middle East conflict where LRB writers are uniformly one-sided, promoting one narrative while dismissing the other. Such a lack of balanced analysis does a disservice to the complex and deeply contested nature of the conflict.
Historically, we valued the LRB for its aversion to the tendentious. This foundational principle is now habitually violated, with the magazine entrenched in a single ideological camp and reluctant to challenge its own assumptions or critically engage with opposing viewpoints.
Without exception, as far as we can see, LRB writers prove unable to break free from their biases, depicting one set of combatants as wholly innocent and sympathetic, and the other as wholly malign and hateful, as if programmed by the sort of directive one recognises from Terminator movies.
It’s very well done: always fluent, always full of information, and highly persuasive for those with an appetite for it. But it’s also propaganda, driven by a specific point of view, and written in a language that would not be tolerated if applied to any other social class or ethnic group. Such is the frequency of this messaging that readers are very likely to have become convinced of what is said and of the writers’ power of revelation. Der Stürmer was similarly effective in its day: we often underrate propaganda as always crude and obvious; on the contrary, it can be intelligent, sophisticated, difficult for the ordinary reader to find fault with, and attractive to read.
Those who commission these essays are complicit. They evidently have an agenda and are untroubled that repeatedly amplifying the same viewpoints undermines their intellectual credibility, just as it encourages readers to buy into simple stereotypes held to be immune to questioning.
They appear to have no interest in exploring the true thinking of how those whose mentality they casually parse. Far easier to write off “the other” as uniquely guilty, without ever considering the legitimacy of counter-narratives. It shouldn’t need saying but, for anyone who hasn’t already got the point, this crass divisiveness is racist. It would be recognised as such immediately if it concerned any other group; the LRB has focused in on the one ethnic group the world feels it has a free hand in bad-mouthing.
That’s not to ask LRB writers to do a volte face and somehow automatically uphold the arguments of the side they have become so skilful at denouncing. That would be equally flawed. Open enquiry should not have a political agenda—in any direction—because openness cannot have a pre-determined purpose. But if the LRB insists on having a moral goal, a better one would be that of bringing people together. As it stands, its writing on the Middle East is reminiscent of the Inquisition—admit you’re a heretic so we can burn you or deny it until we’ve tortured you to death. If the magazine were truly dedicated to a worthy cause, it would focus on transcending existing divisions and fostering dialogue. Enlightenment, in its truest sense, involves bridging gaps and finding common ground, not perpetuating schism.
Interestingly, explicitly left-wing publications display a far more balanced critique of Middle Eastern politics. Despite their predictable ideological stances on issues like corporatism and capitalism,
such platforms tend to view both Netanyahu’s government and Hamas with equal disdain, charging both with being equally cursed, equally corrupt, equally sustained by ill-gotten gains, and equally destructive of the working classes whom they ought to be protecting. And because they write from, and support, the working classes, they can afford to condemn Hamas as a reactionary and fascist organisation in a way that the LRB cannot and will not.
If no one else, historians who write for the LRB must feel increasingly embarrassed by it. For anyone with a long perspective, it is obvious that over the course of time, parties clash and parties come together. In the Wars of the Roses, nearly 600 years ago, Yorkists and Lancastrians were consumed by mutual hatreds; 500 years ago, Catholics burned Protestants and Protestants burned Catholics. But hatreds pass and the righteous set out to speed the process.
LENGTH AS A FORM OF BULLYING
One of the original attractions of the LRB is that, like the admirable New York Review of Books on which it was modelled, it commissioned professional writers as well as academics, and welcomed long-form essays that were free to sidestep the review format. This blend of authorial variety, length and independence brought a welcome change from other literary magazines, most notably the more rigid Times Literary Supplement.
At one time, the LRB’s reviews seemed not only insightful but authoritative. That no longer seems the case, even when they go on at great length. One exceptionally long essay, Andrew O’Hagan’s 60,000-word piece on the Grenfell Tower fire, faced unprecedented criticism for alleged inaccuracies and insensitive handling of interview material. Critics from Verso, New Socialist and Libcom.org denounced the essay for its perceived biases and factual errors.
New Socialist described the piece as symptomatic of a middle-class journalism that perpetuates the status quo under the guise of objectivity. It added that magazines are not neutral platforms, that editorial decisions shape but also endorse content, and that the failings of O’Hagan’s piece reflected on the publication as much as on the author.
There turn out to be problems also with the LRB’s cavalier approach to book reviews, which often serve as vehicles for the reviewers’ own agendas rather than rightly deferring to the books themselves.
This is a practice that can mislead readers, as many book-buyers will have found to their cost; it also exploits the original works, privileging the reviewers’ interests over the authors’. Such “colonialism” would be found unacceptable in other contexts; at the LRB it seems to be thought of as fair game.
One used to think of the LRB as committed to quality of thought and argument but today’s essays are not shy of winning points by resorting to in-jokes and nods to its readers. In one random example, contributing editor David Runciman began an article about the Tories with an opening
jab at George Osborne’s imaginary ambitions to become prime minister: “George Osborne would no doubt have loved to be PM, but he probably knew it wasn’t a job for him. Too smirky, too shifty, too obviously at home in city boardrooms—the British public could tell a mile off that Osborne was a bit of a banker.”
This is kind of funny: not the banker joke itself, which we’ve all heard before, but the donnish use of it, which makes it sound cleverer than it is. But what’s Runciman doing with it, other than taking off Martin Amis? Sniggering, of course. Can he not snigger? Of course, but it’s not the sniggering that’s the problem: it’s the partisanship that it co-opts. For a fellow of the British
Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, it’s cheap.
The LRB’s use of innuendo and coded language helps reinforce its alignment with a like-minded audience but it is a weakness, not only because it bypasses critical argument but, again, because it is divisive. If you don’t identify with those the magazine wishes to curry favour with, then, by definition you find yourself identified with the magazine’s outcasts.
This may explain the magazine’s declining readership. Six years ago, when Booklaunch first appeared, the LRB could boast 49,000 readers in the UK and Ireland, according to figures vetted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, to which it is a paid-up member. Since then, the magazine’s readership has plunged by 15 percent to 35,000 in the UK and ROI (although its website still claims the higher figure).
The nudge-nudge wink-wink assault on political enemies is not a hallmark of higher thinking but a descent into vulgarity, andour impression is that readers have noted this and given up on it. If hearsay evidence is true, it appears that many one-time loyal readers no longer see the LRB as virtuous and no longer feel represented by it.
THE CULTURE OF THE SMUG
Who and what does the LRB now represent? According to the playwright and comedian Alan Bennett, albeit nearly thirty years ago, “the LRB has maintained a consistently radical stance on politics and social affairs,” and this is a claim that the magazine evidently relishes. In reality,
though, it has only survived because of substantial private backing—ten years ago the family trust of one of its three founding editors was helping it fund a £27 million deficit—and deep pockets have given it the editorial freedom to foster fanciful academic beliefs. At the same time,
alongside its courting of such “consistently radical” writers as Tariq Ali and Slavoj Žižek, it now has a side operation selling commercial fripperies, from branded tote bags to high-priced picnic blankets and umbrellas.
In the next street to its offices near the British Museum, it runs a sprawling brick-and-mortar bookshop, made up of three retail units with a rateable value of about £60,000. Whether books (and the decorative cakes it also sells there) help pay the rent or add to its costs is not public knowledge but the benefit seems so tentative that there must be some other value it is
selling—perhaps the association with art galleries and heritage centres. Even then, the optics are smack of hypocrisy and double standards.
And just how “consistently radical” is the LRB, actually? The afore-mentioned David Runciman can’t be blamed for being a hereditary peer—becoming 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford was an accident of birth—but it’s pretty rich of him, in the example quoted above, to take down a
former member of the Bullingdon Club for conjecturally aspiring to be prime minister when he himself hasn’t so far cared to renounce his peerage.
While the LRB’s stable of writers is of course not packed with peers, it is fascinating to note how many come from upper-class stock—Mary Wellesley, for example, turns out to be the daughter of the Marquess of Douro and Princess Antonia of Prussia—and how untroubled the editorial team is about its own social pretensions and how they might be perceived.
This may be a British problem, where self-conscious intellectualism is one of the goals of public schooling, made possible only because smaller classes of high-achieving children are taught more challenging curricula to higher standards by better qualified teachers. As an intellectual beacon, the LRB evidently attracts those who can perform at a high level, and they in turn contribute to a shared culture of self-assurance, class and affluence.
The leading figures that created Britain’s Welfare State rose from humbler, origins: Aneurin Bevan, Ernest Bevin, Jim Griffiths, Jennie Lee, Herbert Morrison, Ellen Wilkinson, Manny Shinwell, George Lansbury, Tom Johnston, James Chuter Ede. Many of them wrote—Lansbury was editor of the Labour newspaper The Daily Herald—but all got their hands dirty and put theory into practice by becoming MPs and government ministers. Bevin, as a trade union leader, always felt deeply out of place visiting 10 Downing Street to hammer out terms. One can’t imagine him or any of the others feeling at home writing for the LRB. Their clogs would soil
the carpets.
By contrast, the LRB’s crop of “consistently radical” writers appears to be anything but the product of the class that requires empowerment. They’re already empowered. They’re also political virgins: all very clever but favoured with exercising their cleverness in the abstract: on the page or in the lecture hall. Lucky them: they get rewarded for theorising without
ever being required to answer for anything they say.
The darling of the pack appears to be contributing editor Rosemary Hill. “The first time I remember meeting Carmen [Callil] was at a London Review Christmas party,” Hill gushed in 2022. “She came up to me and said: ‘You’re marvellous, darling’”—because that’s how they talk,
darling. Hill, drawn to aristos as a moth to a flame, has written in breathless veneration about Prince Philip (made divine by the South Pacific islanders of Tanna in Vanuatu—so funny); about Queen Mary, his wife’s grandmother; about the Queen Mother; about Edward and Mrs Simpson; and about Charles and Camilla; while her 2020 review, in over 4,000 words, of Anne Glenconner’s memoir Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown is mostly an admission of her own fawning fascination. She evidently gets first dibs on partrician biographies, and yet the magazine seems unabashed by her laughable snobbery. Odd for a publication so “consistently radical” to be giving the likes of Royalty Magazine and Country Life a run for their money.
Again, it would be wrong to tar the whole magazine with one brush, but to retain a Sycophancy Correspondent—that’s to say, a correspondent who glories in snobbery rather than analysing it—tells us something about the LRB’s bubble mentality, its selective endorsement of various in-groups and its decrying of others whom it feels can be written off with snarky sneers.
This contradiction seems lost on the editorial team, ensconced in their Bloomsburian towers, away from the practical realities they critique and the divisions they promote. As the magazine peddles “fiendishly fun 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles” and powder-blue mugs and vases with cack handwriting down the sides, it moves further from its founding ethos as an outpost of serious intellectual discourse and closer to a genteel preciosity that any normal person would find repellent.
“Come back,” one wants to say. “Come back, sort yourself out, and once again lead the way. We used to admire you; we wish we could admire you again.”