LRB Diary

Working through Kafka would seem to be an irresistible temptation or maybe even a rite of passage for every kind of writer. You can trace the tradition through the archives of the London Review of Books, and the chain of contributors who have used his hands in its pages, over the years: Alan Bennett, Judith Butler, Amit Chaudhuri, Rivka Galchen,...

‘There are few persons’, Anthony Powell wrote in John Aubrey and His Friends, ‘of whom it would be more true to say that they were interested in everything.’ One might say something similar of the London Review of Books, or so we'd like to think. It is our sense of spiritual affinity with the 17th-century antiquary—and pioneering archaeologist, folklorist, garden...