Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for The New York Times. Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon ...

In 1928, the V&A acquired a previously unknown portrait. It shows the Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams (c. 1690-1762), dressed in a wig, surrounded by books and scientific instruments. In all ...

The Biden presidency was restorationist and Harris promised to continue in that vein. Essentially, they wanted to ...

You might think that a novelist who works in more than one language would want language itself to become conceptual, ...

Given what it sets out to do, it’s hard to fault The Thursday Murder Club. The sentences flow smoothly, the jokes ...

The first hour of Anora, Sean Baker says, belongs to the genre of romantic comedy. This makes interesting sense if ...

As peripatetic as he was, Fred Sparks, who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab ...

It had been twenty years since my last research trip to the British Library when, in November last year, I received an email ...

‘Even blindfolded,’ Emanuel Litvinoff wrote of the interwar East End in Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), ‘I’d have known where we were by the smell of the different streets – reek of rotten ...

As sparks fly up from the welding rods, the beak of a bald eagle emblazoned on the welder’s mask curves menacingly towards the viewer. With comic-book subtlety the image screams: American industrial ...

At PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on 4 November, teams of ushers were handing out signs that said: ‘Trump will fix it.’ They didn’t allow homemade signs because it was a safety risk, they said, though ...

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 ...