hckrnws

FYI this is a very long winded and meandering history of phrenology and palm reading.

So if that's your thing, go nuts

6 long paragraphs before it even tells you the name of the book it is reviewing or what it is about?

The name London Review of Books may mislead you. Ostensibly, the articles are book reviews, but barely. The books reviewed are more starting points into long-form articles on their subject matter. The articles are uniformly fantastic, though obviously not uniformly interesting to everyone. I find that every issue carries about three to five articles I find really interesting.

I‘ve just yesterday read an old LRB issue where in one article the book ostensibly reviewed was first mentioned after three whole pages!

Am I getting old or did it use to be much better 10 or 20 years ago? Half the LRB feels so politicised to me now, and the other half barely feels erudite. Was I just too young to pick it up back then?

I peeked at the front covers from the archives - 2007 has everything from global warming to the French riots, for example, although there's certainly more current affairs content. I'm not sure what you mean by the other decline in standards, though.

Parent already knows this, but for completeness to the grandparent, the LRB is part of a small genre of literary journal that does this with "reviews of books". The New York Review of Books (which begat the LRB), and the Times Literary Supplement when it's feeling risque.