LRB @ 30 Special Issue

CONTENTS:

In a major essay, Jacqueline Rose investigates the history and practice of ‘honour killing’ in its many contexts - religious, cultural, linguistic.

Hilary Mantel diagnoses nine types of hypochondria.

Julian Barnes goes sailing with Maupassant.

Troubled by the campaign for the release of Roman Polanski, Jenny Diski recalls being raped as a teenager.

Jeremy Harding looks into what will happen to the detainees when Guantánamo Bay is closed, and the real reasons they were put there in the first place.

Julian Bell reads Van Gogh’s letters.

Alan Bennett on writing and rehearsing his new play, The Habit of Art.

Colm Tóibín on John Cheever: his family, his sexuality, his hatred of the suburbs, his drinking - and his stories.

Thomas Nagel analyses the idea of the self.

John Lanchester exhumes Lehman Brothers.

Jonathan Raban remembers learning to read: first from his mother, later from Empson.

Andrew O’Hagan: ‘Please don’t tell my mum.’

Frank Kermode on the unacknowledged greatness of William Golding.

Daniel Soar points out some surprising similarities between the work of Sebastian Faulks and Paradise Lost.

Short Cuts: Thomas Jones on Bio Insecurity

At the Movies: Michael Wood on Agnès Varda

At the British Museum: Peter Campbell on Moctezuma

Poems by John Ashbery and Charles Simic