Feb 5, 2010 · I n 1842, with eight highly productive years of writing still ahead of him, Balzac wrote a preface to his Comédie humaine, which already comprised dozens of books.He defended the morality of the work, and revealed the scale of his ambition – nothing less than the creation of a complete picture of France in his time.

The London Review of Books is Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas.Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from art and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy, not to mention fiction and poetry.In the age …

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The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time by Karl Polanyi. Penguin, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 0 241 68555 6

On the first day of his second term as US president, Donald Trump described Gaza as a ‘phenomenal location on the sea’. Living in a tent close to the beach in southern Gaza, my friend Marwa has had her request for permission to travel to the north, to visit her elderly mother, denied three times for ‘security’ reasons.

3 days ago · Hamas: The Quest for Power by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell. Polity, 331 pp., £17.99, June 2024, 978 1 5095 6493 4

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Fourth Estate, 630 pp., £30, October 2024, 978 0 00 812655 1

Hospitality, Volume 2 by Jacques Derrida, edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Peggy Kamuf, translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago, 261 pp., £36, April 2024, 978 0 226 83130 5

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 by N.A.M. Rodger. Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4

LRB Selections 1: Frank Kermode ‘Papers speak through their writers. And of all the London Review’s writers Frank Kermode was the one through whom we spoke most often and most eloquently.’– Mary-Kay Wilmers. Without Frank Kermode there would have been no London Review of Books.In July 1979, during the management lock-out at the Times, he wrote an article in the Observer calling for a ...