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LRB · Hilary Mantel · Royal Bodies

Last summer at the festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was asked to name a famous person and choose a book to give them. I hate the leaden repetitiveness of these little quizzes: who would be the guests at…
LENGTH: 22 minutes (5609 words)

Subscribe to Harper’sfor only $16.97/year

The players at Table 25 fought first over the choice of pawns. Doug Herold, a forty-four-year-old real estate appraiser, settled on the car. The player across from him, a shark-eyed IT recruiter…
LENGTH: 3 minutes (993 words)

The Disappeared

The author, photographed in London in 1994, five years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence forced him into hiding. Photograph by Richard Avedon.
PUBLISHED: Sept. 17, 2012
LENGTH: 3 minutes (985 words)

NEW SOUTH JOURNALISM: Fact-Checking Feature

“The Writer” (2009) by Kelly C. Tate. I work on and off as a fact-checker at the most accurate magazine in America. I think so, at least. The checker assigned to this piece may come up…
PUBLISHED: Aug. 27, 2012
LENGTH: 26 minutes (6597 words)

The North West London Blues

The Victorian Society An 1894 drawing of Willesden Green Library Last time I was in Willesden Green I took my daughter to visit my mother. The sun was out. We wandered down Brondesbury Park towards…
PUBLISHED: June 2, 2012
LENGTH: 13 minutes (3366 words)

The Strange Politics of Gertrude Stein

Why were so many prominent modernist writers and philosophers attracted to fascist or authoritarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century? A list of those who were not—Samuel…
LENGTH: 10 minutes (2523 words)

Now That Books Mean Nothing

Emil Robinson, Pink Book, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Waterhouse & Dodd. About a month ago, I had surgery. I am not sick, but the surgery was to reduce my risk of becoming sick in the future:…
LENGTH: 14 minutes (3582 words)

Oscar Night in Hollywood

Five or six years ago a distinguished writer-director (if I may be permitted the epithet in connection with a Hollywood personage) was co-author of a screen play nominated for an Academy Award. He…
LENGTH: 15 minutes (3781 words)
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