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Hegel gets real

Terry eagleton.

Hegel’s dissatisfaction with the revolutions he surveys comes down in almost every instance to their otherworldliness or estrangement from reality, whether we are speaking of Jesus or Robespierre, ancient Athenian philosophers or modern Kantians. 

For Hegel, the actual contains the possible, so that you can plunge into it with no fear of losing sight of a desirable alternative. You don’t need to tack some arbitrary utopian dimension onto what exists, since what exists already secretes within itself the seeds of what ought to be.

What now for Ukraine?

W hen ​ General Valery Zaluzhny, then Ukraine’s senior military commander, spoke in November of a stalemate, it was widely taken in the West as a signal that the war was frozen in all but name: that Ukraine and Russia had reached their fighting limits, that Russia could invade no further and Ukraine could liberate no more. Ukraine’s southern summer counteroffensive had fallen far...

The intermittence of Western arms money is not the Ukrainian military’s only problem as it organises to do three things: hold Russia at bay this year, push it back in the medium term, and create an impregnable defence for an indefinite future truce. Alongside the lack of money to fund weapons is the lack of weapons to buy.

On Mary Magdalene

Marina warner.

A lmost ​ every woman in the story of Jesus is called Mary. Sometimes the writers of the gospels got round this by adding a patronymic or a husband (Mary Salome, Mary of Cleophas, Mary Jacobi). The Virgin Mary has a stable identity as the mother of Jesus, but at least one document (attributed to Cyril of Jerusalem) bundled all the Marys into one. More commonly, the Marys have combined and then...

Devotees often exult in the stripping of her beauty and her wealth; she is imagined as a woman of substance, who owned property in Magdala (hence her name), and when she repents and gives all this up, her reduction becomes the source of great satisfaction to the worthy men who love her in spite of – or because of – their general suspicion of and contempt for women.

Sudden Death Syndrome

Whether they killed him quickly or slowly, there is no doubt who is responsible for Aleksei Navalny’s demise. Yet even though his was a death many times foretold, the news that came on 16 February was still a profound shock, and a demoralising one for Putin’s opponents.

‘The Zone of Interest’

Michael wood.

J onathan Glazer’s ​ Zone of Interest seems stately at first, even stolid, and a bit too restrained to raise real questions. Once it’s over we realise that its discretion is part of a careful, risky plan. ‘Based on the novel by Martin Amis’, as a credit line says, the film converts a cruel virtuoso performance of literary voices into a sort of belated act of espionage....

It’s not that the locals are in denial about what is going on in the camp. Everyone seems to have incorporated the horrors as real but ignorable aspects of regular existence. Höss and Hedwig not only tolerate Auschwitz. It fails to touch their happiness in any way.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

A lex Comfort ​ was exhausting. After meeting him, the pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson swapped notes. ‘If we could learn to produce on a 24-hour level the way he does, I think we’d probably have it made,’ Johnson said. ‘Five or six hours is all I can stand,’ Masters replied. ‘I end up out of breath while he’s...

Alex Comfort became best known for The Joy of Se x (1972). This annoyed him. It was his 31st book. As well as a sexologist, he was a poet, novelist, doctor, biologist, gerontologist, anarchist, scientific humanist, public intellectual, and activist in the pacifist and anti-nuclear movements. Even as a child, Comfort was a polymath.

In the latest issue

22 february 2024.

  • Marina Warner: On Mary Magdalene
  • Terry Eagleton: Hegel gets real
  • James Meek: What now for Ukraine?
  • Aziz Huq: Short Cuts
  • Mark Ford: ‘Lunar Solo’
  • Barbara Everett: Henry and Hamlet
  • Diarmaid MacCulloch: Jesuit Methods
  • Laleh Khalili: Red Sea Attacks
  • James Vincent: Automata
  • Ben Walker: On VAR
  • Ferdinand Mount: Fans and Un-Fans
  • Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Mr Sex
  • Francis Gooding: At the Imperial War Museum
  • Lorraine Daston: Linnaeus makes the rules
  • Colin Kidd: Constitutional Dramas
  • Michael Wood: At the Movies
  • Lola Seaton: On A.K. Blakemore
  • Keiron Pim: Diary

Think Differently

Subscribe to the LRB – perfect for anyone with an interest in history, politics, literature and the arts.

Jesuit Methods

Diarmaid macculloch.

I n the mid-18th century ​ an exceptionally adventurous European traveller might have got as far as a desert region in what is now Arizona, to be rewarded with hospitality from the presiding priest in the stately local mission church. There was likely to have been chocolate to drink, transported from Yucatán some two thousand miles to the south, served in Fr Philipp Segesser von...

What​ was this Society for which Pope Paul III provided a charter? It was not a religious order, though it is often styled as such. Its members were neither monks nor friars. Its self-descriptor as a Societas aligned it with the ‘companies’ or devotional confraternities of priests and laity in late medieval Italy.

Morality without the Metaphysics

Jonathan rée.

None of us can fully disengage from morality: even if we think of ourselves as free spirits we still want our lives to make a good story. But many are foolish enough to be impressed by the cynical bravado of Brecht’s Macheath: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral (‘Feeding comes first, morals must wait’) – as if morality were a luxury that need not concern us, like fast cars or a top hat.

Alasdair MacIntyre drew a conclusion he has stuck to ever since: that philosophy takes time. Instead of choosing an opinion that appeals to you and forsaking all others, you need to take on different arguments and give them time to sort themselves out.

Losing San Francisco

Rebecca solnit.

S eeing cars ​ with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough as a pedestrian, but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand. Since August, driverless cars have been available as taxis hailed through apps but I more often see...

I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right. 

On A.K. Blakemore

Lola seaton.

T he narrator ​ of A.K. Blakemore’s first novel, The Manningtree Witches (2021), is a 19-year-old woman called Rebecca West. She lives with her tough, rowdy mother, the Beldam West, and their cat, Vinegar Tom, in a cramped cottage on the outskirts of Manningtree, a small port town in north Essex where the Stour widens into an estuary. Rebecca and the Beldam usually get by doing laundry...

The Manningtree Witches and The Glutton are both driven by an appetite for the ‘juiciest’ words – for ‘how they feel when you say them, or look at them’. But if a writer seems more invested in verbal effects than in what she is communicating, disillusionment sets in. I came to doubt that Blakemore was focused on what she was telling me.

Trump’s Indictments

I n ​ the 1920 US presidential election, Eugene Debs, or Convict 9653, won 913,693 votes while serving a ten-year sentence in a federal prison in Atlanta. ‘Under the influence of this unreasoning mob psychology,’ the editors of the New York Times complained, an ‘acknowledged criminal is nightly applauded as loudly as many of the candidates for the presidency who have won...

Trump’s misdeeds have been amply documented through two impeachment proceedings, extensive congressional investigations, Mueller’s final report and endless news coverage. Perhaps the liberal principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is at work. If so, it is having distinctly illiberal effects.

In Mostyska

I n spring ​ 2019 I stood in a meadow outside the small Ukrainian town of Mostyska, squinting at a transliteration of the Mourner’s Kaddish on my phone. A local farmer had directed my guide towards a couple of stubs of rock, the only remnants of dozens of gravestones that had long ago been removed for use as building materials. Brown hens pecked at the grass. It was impossible to tell...

It was impossible to tell where my ancestors were buried or the location of the mass grave containing five hundred of the town’s Jews, shot in 1942. But few descendants of the Ostjuden who visit Eastern Europe in search of their roots expect more than this; a good result is finding that a supermarket hasn’t been built on top of your relatives.

Henry and Hamlet

Barbara everett.

I ntroducing ​ his text of Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare , Frank Kermode calls it ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, and adds, as if conceding to the long academic stress on its highly ‘problematic’ character: ‘how Shakespeare came to write it is, of course, a mystery on which it is useless to speculate.’ As a...

A work of art is what it is, even more than what it says. The only real way of seeing how Hamlet differs from Henry is to perceive the great difference in the plays that hold them, a mature tragedy and an early history.

Constitutional Dramas

M ost historians ​ nowadays are suspicious of ‘constitutional history’, in part because they’re uneasy about its associations with the Anglocentric arrogance of what is sometimes called Whig history, a self-satisfied celebration of England’s relatively smooth progress towards liberal outcomes. The historical reaction against Whig triumphalism also exposed the...

The peculiarities of the British constitution mean that it requires the combined input of the disciplines of law, politics and history – each with its own priorities, sensitivities and hinterlands of learning – to make sense of its practices. But the field has been vacated by most historians.

O n ​ the baseball fields of America in the first half of the 20th century Bill Klem was the law. As an umpire between 1905 and 1941 he worked eighteen World Series. His nickname was the Old Arbitrator, and the decisions he made were absolute. He is said to have been the first umpire to communicate to the crowd in the stands as well as the players on the field. He didn’t just announce...

Despite the mistakes, video assistant refereeing works. A 2020 study showed that overall decision accuracy improved with the use of VAR from an already high 92.1 per cent to 98.3 per cent. So what’s all the fuss about? Part of the problem is that although the right decisions are being reached more often, it doesn’t feel like they are.

From the blog

Israel and the crisis in judaism, eli zaretsky.

Not for the first time, there is a crisis in Jewish identity. Many Jews, including myself, abhor Israel’s current policies, the occupation  . . .

Whether they killed him quickly or slowly, there is no doubt who is responsible for Aleksei Navalny’s demise. Yet even though his was a death  . . .

Think about the Nation

Skye arundhati thomas.

The Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut visited the Israeli embassy in Delhi at the end of October for a photo op. ‘Like we deserve a Bharat dedicated  . . .

Necessity or Compulsion?

Eliane glaser.

I have never owned a smartphone. The man in the shop couldn’t understand my refusal. ‘You get one free with your plan,’ he told me. I share  . . .

Harry Stopes

On Friday morning, three dozen people gathered outside the Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development in Berlin to demand a permanent  . . .

Eyes on Gaza

Selma dabbagh.

At the end of last month I went to an event at the Photographer’s Gallery, where the grandson (and namesake) of the Armenian Gazan photographer  . . .

Sous la plage, les archives

Richard vinen.

Le Roy Ladurie’s fascination with what he referred to in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1973 as the ‘immobile’ history  . . .

Closed Loops

Mark papers.

I had the feeling, sitting down to my marking after the Christmas break, that I was an unwilling participant in a version of Turing’s game  . . .

Protest, what is it good for?

James butler and thomas jones.

From the Egyptian Revolution to Extinction Rebellion, the 2010s were marked by a global wave of spontaneous and largely structureless mass protests. Despite overwhelming numbers and popular support, most of these movements failed to achieve their aims, and in many cases led to worse conditions. James Butler joins Tom to make sense of the ‘mass protest decade’, sharing historical...

From the Egyptian Revolution to Extinction Rebellion, the 2010s were marked by a global wave of spontaneous and largely structureless mass protests. Despite overwhelming numbers and popular...

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, published in 2017, the first into English by a woman, was hailed as a ‘revelation’ by the New York Times and a ‘cultural landmark’ by the Guardian. With her translation of the Iliad, ten years in the making, she has given us a complete Homer for a new generation. In her hands, this thrilling, magical and often horrifying...

Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey, published in 2017, the first into English by a woman, was hailed as a ‘revelation’ by the New York Times and a ‘cultural...

Human Conditions: ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ by Jean-Paul Sartre

Judith butler and adam shatz.

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew , originally published in French as Réflexions Sur La Question Juive . Sartre’s ‘portraits’ of the ‘anti-Semite’ and the ‘Jew’, as he saw them, caused controversy at the time for directly confronting...

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew , originally published in French as Réflexions...

Proust in English

Michael wood and thomas jones.

Did the foundational event of Proust’s great novel really happen? Michael Wood talks to Tom about several English translations of  In Search of Lost Time , old and new, and what they reveal about different ways of reading the novel. If the dipping of the madeleine in his tea conjures an overwhelming memory of the narrator’s childhood, it is also a challenge to the conscious...

Did the foundational event of Proust’s great novel really happen? Michael Wood talks to Tom about several English translations of  In Search of Lost Time , old and new, and what they...

Modern-ish Poets (Live): The Waste Land

Mark ford and seamus perry.

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry return for the final episode in their Close Readings series, Modern-ish Poets , looking at 19th and 20th century poetry. On the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in book form, Mark and Seamus consider how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous meanings that have been drawn out of it, and its lasting influence.This is the...

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry return for the final episode in their Close Readings series, Modern-ish Poets , looking at 19th and 20th century poetry. On the centenary of the publication of...

The Lost Art of Paste-Up

Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting required a sharp scalpel, a parallel-motion board and plenty of glue.

As the  London Review of Books  celebrates its 40th anniversary, we look back at what paste-up used to involve in the...

Arranging and rearranging a magazine’s layout before it goes to press is all done on computers now. But in the years before desktop publishing software, the work of cutting and pasting...

Eric Hobsbawm: The Consolations of History

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came to power and his communist membership, to the jazz clubs of 1950s Soho and the makings of New Labour, taking in Italian bandits, Peruvian peasant movements and the development of nationalism in...

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told, from his teenage years in Germany as Hitler came...

Collections

Lrb winter lectures 2010-2023.

Judith Butler on who owns Kafka; Hilary Mantel on royal bodies; Andrew O’Hagan on Julian Assange; Mary Beard on women in power; Patricia Lockwood on the communal mind of the internet; Meehan Crist...

Missing Pieces I: The je ne sais quoi

Writing about mystery, the unintelligible and that for which no words can be found by Jenny Diski, Jacqueline Rose, Adam Phillips, John Lanchester, Alice Spawls and Hal Foster.

Missing Pieces II: What was left out

Writing about obsolete objects, missing words and anonymous writers by Andrew O’Hagan, Amia Srinivasan, Irina Dumitrescu, Lucia Berlin, Lawrence Rainey and Sheila Fitzpatrick.

Missing Pieces III: Alchemical Pursuits

Writing about cognitive gaps, stolen artworks and missing the things you never had by Hilary Mantel, Michael Neve, Rosa Lyster, Clancy Martin, James Davidson and Malcolm Gaskill.

Analysis Gone Wrong

Unorthodox psychoanalytic encounters in the LRB archive by Wynne Godley, Sherry Turkle, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Nicholas Spice, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jenny Diski, Brigid Brophy, Adam Phillips, D.J. Enright...

Living by the Clock

Writing about time by David Cannadine, Perry Anderson, Angela Carter, Stanley Cavell, Barbara Everett, Edward Said, John Banville, Rebecca Solnit, David Wootton, Jenny Diski, Malcolm Bull, Andrew O’Hagan...

Gossip and Notes on Work and Reading

For the first time since 1982, there is no annual Diary by Alan Bennett. He says his life is so dull he won’t inflict it on LRB readers. If it suddenly gets more interesting he promises he’ll let us...

Writing about drinking by Victor Mallet, Anne Carson, John Lanchester, Wendy Cope, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Jaine, Jenny Diski, Marina Warner, Clancy Martin and John Lloyd. 

War on God! That is Progress!

Writing about anarchism in the LRB archive by Steve Fraser, Susan Watkins, T.J. Clark, Zoë Heller, Hal Foster, Wes Enzinna and Jessica Olin.

Suffering Souls

Writing for Halloween by Leslie Wilson, John Sturrock, Thomas Jones, Michael Newton, Marina Warner and Gavin Francis.

Ministry of Apparitions

Writing about superstition by Matthew Sweeney, Hilary Mantel, Malcolm Gaskill, Patricia Lockwood, Theodore Zeldin, Katherine Rundell, Peter Campbell, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Angela Carter, Ian Penman...

The day starts now

Summer morning reading from the LRB archive by Angela Carter, Eleanor Birne, Steven Shapin, Tom Crewe, Patrick McGuinness and Jenny Diski. 

Summer lunchtime reading from the LRB archive by James Meek, Penelope Fitzgerald, Bee Wilson, Colm Tóibín and Rosa Lyster. 

Oh What A Night

Summer evening reading from the LRB archive by Anne Carson, Rosemary Hill, John Gallagher, Zoë Heller, Anne Diebel and Patricia Lockwood.

World Weather

From June 2022 to June 2023, the LRB has been collaborating with the World Weather Network, a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts organisations in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland,...

Writing about thinking up other worlds by Glen Newey, Terry Eagleton, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Susan Pedersen, David Trotter and Anthony Pagden. 

In the Classroom

Writing about teaching and learning by William Davies, Ian Jack, Jenny Turner, Thomas Jones, Lorna Finlayson, Paul Foot, Wang Xiuying, Marina Warner and Stefan Collini.  

Plainclothes in our Living Rooms

Writing about the police by Barbara Wootton, Daniel Trilling, Alice Spawls, Adam Reiss, Ronan Bennett, Thomas Jones, Paul Foot, Katrina Forrester, Melanie McFadyean, Matt Foot and Christopher Tayler.

Little Monstrosities

Writing about dog/human bonds by Hannah Rose Woods, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Iain Sinclair, Michael Burns, Anne Carson, Alison Light, Frank Cioffi, Amia Srinivasan and Jenny Turner.

How shall we repaint the kitchen?

Writing about colour in the LRB archive by Ian Hacking, Anne Enright, John Kinsella, Alison Light, Julian Bell, David Garrioch, Emily LaBarge and Stephen Mulhall.

LRB Screen x Mubi: ‘American Psycho’

American Psycho on 26 February is the first of this year’s six screenings at the Garden Cinema, in partnership with MUBI: Mary Harron’s elegant adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s satirical horror novel. Harron herself will be introducing the film and discussing it afterwards with host Gareth Evans.

LRB Winter Lectures 2024

Buy tickets here for this year's Winter Lectures at St James Church, Clerkenwell: Pankaj Mishra on the Shoah after Gaza, Hazel V. Carby on decolonising history and Terry Eagleton on the origins of culture.

Aniefiok Ekpoudom & Gary Younge: Where We Come From

Lrb screen x mubi: ‘american psycho’, pankaj mishra: the shoah after gaza.

In the next issue: Geoff Mann on America's favourite gun.

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The 13 Best Book Review Sites and Book Rating Sites

Knowing where to buy books can be challenging. So, here are the best book review sites to help you avoid buying books that you'll regret reading.

Nobody likes to spend money on a new book only to face that overwhelming feeling of disappointment when it doesn't live up to your expectations. The solution is to check out a few book review sites before you hit the shops. The greater the diversity of opinions you can gather, the more confidence you can have that you'll enjoy the title.

Which book review and book rating sites are worth considering? Here are the best ones.

1. Goodreads

goodreads

Goodreads is arguably the leading online community for book lovers. If you want some inspiration for which novel or biography to read next, this is the book review site to visit.

There's an endless number of user-generated reading lists to explore, and Goodreads itself publishes dozens of "best of" lists across a number of categories. You can do a book search by plot or subject , or join book discussions and reading groups with thousands of members.

You can participate in the community by adding your own rankings to books you've read and leaving reviews for other people to check out. Occasionally, there are even bonus events like question and answer sessions with authors.

2. LibraryThing

librarything book review

LibraryThing is the self-proclaimed largest book club in the world. It has more than 2.3 million members and is one of the best social networking platforms for book lovers .

With a free account, you can add up to 200 books to your library and share them with other users. But it's in the other areas where LibraryThing can claim to be one of the best book review sites.

Naturally, there are ratings, user reviews, and tags. But be sure to click on the Zeitgeist tab at the top of the page. It contains masses of information, including the top books by rating, by the number of reviews, by authors, and loads more.

3. Book Riot

book riot

Book Riot is a blog. It publishes listicles on dozens of different topics, many of which review the best books in a certain genre. To give you an idea, some recent articles include Keeping Hoping Alive: 11 Thrilling YA Survival Stories and The Best Historical Fiction Books You’ve Never Heard Of .

Of course, there's also plenty of non-reading list content. If you have a general affinity for literature, Book Riot is definitely worth adding to the list of websites you browse every day.

bookish

Bookish is a site that all members of book clubs should know about. It helps you prep for your next meeting with discussion guides, book quizzes, and book games. There are even food and drink suggestions, as well as playlist recommendations.

But the site is more than just book club meetings. It also offers lots of editorial content. That comes in the form of author interviews, opinion essays, book reviews and recommendations, reading challenges, and giveaways.

Be sure to look at the Must-Reads section of the site regularly to get the latest book reviews. Also, it goes without saying that the people behind Bookish are book lovers, too. To get a glimpse of what they’re reading, check out their Staff Reads articles.

5. Booklist

booklist

Booklist is a print magazine that also offers an online portal. Trusted experts from the American Library Association write all the book reviews.

You can see snippets of reviews for different books. However, to read them in full, you will need to subscribe. An annual plan for this book review site costs $184.95 per year.

6. Fantasy Book Review

fantasy book review website

Fantasy Book Review should be high on the list for anyone who is a fan of fantasy works. The book review site publishes reviews for both children's books and adults' books.

It has a section on the top fantasy books of all time and a continually updated list of must-read books for each year. You can also search through the recommended books by sub-genres such as Sword and Sorcery, Parallel Worlds, and Epic Fantasy.

7. LoveReading

lovereading

LoveReading is one of the most popular book review sites in the UK, but American audiences will find it to be equally useful.

The site is divided into fiction and non-fiction works. In each area, it publishes weekly staff picks, books of the month, debuts of the month, ebooks of the month, audiobooks of the month, and the nationwide bestsellers. Each book on every list has a full review that you can read for free.

Make sure you also check out their Highlights tab to get book reviews for selected titles of the month. In Collections , you'll also find themed reading lists such as World War One Literature and Green Reads .

kirkus

Kirkus has been involved in producing book reviews since the 1930s. This book review site looks at the week's bestselling books, and provides lengthy critiques for each one.

As you'd expect, you'll also find dozens of "best of" lists and individual book reviews across many categories and genres.

And while you're on the site, make sure you click on the Kirkus Prize section. You can look at all the past winners and finalists, complete with the accompanying reviews of their books.

reddit books

Although Reddit is a social media site, you can use it to get book reviews of famous books, or almost any other book for that matter! Reddit has a Subreddit, r/books, that is dedicated to book reviews and reading lists.

The subreddit has weekly scheduled threads about a particular topic or genre. Anyone can then chip in with their opinions about which books are recommendable. Several new threads are published every day, with people discussing their latest discovery with an accompanying book rating or review.

You'll also discover a weekly recommendation thread. Recent threads have included subjects such as Favorite Books About Climate Science , Literature of Indigenous Peoples , and Books Set in the Desert . There’s also a weekly What are you Reading? discussion and frequent AMAs.

For more social media-like platforms, check out these must-have apps for book lovers .

10. YouTube

YouTube is not the type of place that immediately springs to mind when you think of the best book review sites online.

Nonetheless, there are several engaging YouTube channels that frequently offer opinions on books they've read. You’ll easily find book reviews of famous books here.

Some of the most notable book review YouTube channels include Better Than Food: Book Reviews , Little Book Owl , PolandBananasBooks , and Rincey Reads .

man in the music book on amazon

Amazon is probably one of your go-to site when you want to buy something. If you don’t mind used copies, it’s also one of the best websites to buy second-hand books .

Now, to get book reviews, just search and click on a title, then scroll down to see the ratings and what others who have bought the book are saying. It’s a quick way to have an overview of the book’s rating. If you spot the words Look Inside above the book cover, it means you get to preview the first few pages of the book, too!

Regardless of the praises or criticisms you have heard from other book review sites, reading a sample is the most direct way to help you gauge the content’s potential and see whether the author’s writing style suits your tastes.

12. StoryGraph

storygraph

StoryGraph is another good book review site that's worth checking out. The book rating is determined by the site's large community of readers. Key in the title of a book you're interested in and click on it in StoryGraph's search results to have an overall view of its rating.

Each book review provides information on the moods and pacing of the story. It also indicates whether the tale is plot or character-driven, what readers feel about the extent of character development, how lovable the characters generally are, and the diversity of the cast.

13. London Review of Books

london review of books

The London Review of Books is a magazine that covers a range of subjects such as culture, literature, and philosophy. Part of its content includes amazingly detailed book reviews. If you feel that most modern book reviews are too brief for your liking, the London Review of Books should suit you best.

You'll gain insight into the flow and themes of the story, as well as a more thorough picture of the events taking place in the book.

Read Book Reviews Before You Buy

The book review sites we've discussed will appeal to different types of readers. Some people will be more comfortable with the easy-to-interpret book rating systems; others will prefer extensive reviews written by experienced professionals.

Although it’s easy to be tempted by a gorgeous book cover, it’s always best to have a quick look at the book reviews before actually buying a copy. This way, you can save your money and spend it on the books that you’ll be proud to display on your shelves for a long time. And check out recommendations, as well, to help you find what's worth reading.

Indie Authors, Get Your Book Reviewed By LoveReading

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You'll have 2 options to choose from when submitting your indie book. We request that you upload your book as a PDF, epub or mobi file. Should you wish to send us a physical copy, please use a PDF of the book cover in your submission, let us know you would like to send a physical copy by emailing [email protected] and we will arrange for an ambassador to review the book and let you know where to send it. Please be aware that posting of physical copies of your book will cause a delay and may have an impact on when we are able to get your feedback returned to you.

The Selection Process

After receiving your book, our Editors will allocate your book to one of the team of Ambassadors who will review the book and provide a detailed review which will then be emailed to you within our turnaround time. Turnaround times start from within 4 weeks of submission. You can see the detailed breakdown of each review option and their respective turnaround times in the 'Review Options' section below.

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It won't preclude us from shouting about books of course! After all, for the past 18 years, we have been used as an information source, rather than bookseller and we are under no illusion that people will entirely leave their loyal retail preference and come to us. We are merely offering a socially responsible alternative, and offering a revenue stream to schools - who are struggling with funding cuts - to enable them to invest in more books for their children.

Only for indie author books, are we happy to include links to other booksellers on the book pages, so when we send you your feedback we will ask you to send us links to your preferred bookseller so that we can feature them with your review.

If your book is available from Gardners, but not at a significant enough discount, we invite you to contact your account manager there and discuss. We need 45% for the book to show as available on our site and still deliver on our business model mentioned above.

Indie Books We Love

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Review Options

Indie author - book plan 1.

£120.00

  • Book review and feedback by a LoveReading ambassador
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  • Turnaround Time 8 weeks
  • * Under no circumstances do we guarantee positive reviews, all reviews will be 100% unbiased.

Please be aware that posting of physical copies of your book will cause a delay and may have an impact on turnaround time.

Indie Author - Book Plan 2

£170.00

  • Turnaround Time 4 weeks

Indie Author - Picture Book Plan

Review option details.

  • Traditional Reviews - an approximately 250-300 word review that includes a general summary for context and a concise, unbiased opinion of the book’s strengths and weaknesses.
  • Longer Reviews - an approximately 500 word review that includes a general summary for context and a concise, unbiased opinion of the book’s strengths and weaknesses.
  • Children’s Book Review - an approximately 200 word review that includes a general summary for context and a concise, unbiased opinion of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. (Includes picture books)
  • Series (2 Books) - an approximately 250-300 word review for each book in the 2-book series that includes a general summary for context and a concise, unbiased opinion of the book’s strengths and weaknesses.
  • Series (3 Books) - an approximately 250-300 word review for each book in the 3-book series that includes a general summary for context and a concise, unbiased opinion of the book’s strengths and weaknesses.

Q. Who are your review Ambassadors?

A. Our Ambassadors are hand-picked from thousands and include book bloggers, librarians, authors, professional reviewers, media execs and more

Q. Who are your consumer reviewers and will they review my book also?

A. We have over 3,000 consumer reviewers who are a mixture of avid book readers and reviewers. We send out a monthly email which will include your book (digital copies only), offering it for review. The number of reviews from this varies, depending on the appetite for your book. We do not guarantee reviews from our consumers but it will be seen by a lot of reviewers who will have the chance to review it.

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A. To post the review on Amazon, please contact an Amazon representative directly. Whilst not guaranteed, most of our reviewers will be active on main book sites and with your permission can share these on a case by case basis.

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A. No. LoveReading is a site that centres around positivity and we believe that everyone's reading tastes are subjective. A book that may not be for us doesn't mean that it's not the perfect book for someone else. We will share the feedback privately with you as unfavourable reviews can offer valuable feedback for improvements, but we will not share any negative thoughts on any books and no one would see it without your permission.

Q. What happens if my Ambassador review is positive?

A. Should your Ambassador review be positive, we will list your book on LoveReading.co.uk and/or LoveReading4Kids.co.uk at no extra charge. If our ambassadors really loved your book, it could also be awarded an “Indie Books We Love” badge, at the reviewer's discretion, and will be listed in our Indie Books We Love section and on the homepage for one month. We will also give you our coveted “Recommended By LoveReading” graphic to use as you see fit.

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A. YES. Our intention is to give honest feedback from a trusted LoveReading Ambassador, and to also provide wide book exposure to mainstream readers and to reward books people love with added exposure. We have worked hard to provide the best value offering on the market.

Q. Yes but I heard it is wrong to pay for reviews.

A. You are paying for a service. You are paying for an honest review. You are also paying for the opportunity to gain exposure to thousands of other reviewers who may want to read your book. And, you are paying for the chance to feature on one of the leading book recommendation sites and online bookstore should your book be positively received. We are presenting this opportunity as an author care and promotion package and have priced it to be accessible to all.

Q. Do I need an ISBN number?

A. You are not required to have an ISBN number in order to complete the submission. However if the book receives positive feedback and is added to the website we will need an ISBN or ASIN as well as a publication date in order to create the book page.

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A. Favourably. Although there is no like-for-like service to what we offer in the UK, there are dozens of sites who charge 2-5 times our price just for a review. Our package delivers a review, the potential to get more reviews from avid readers and the possibility of added exposure on our trusted network of high traffic sites.

Q. Why should I move forward with this opportunity with LoveReading?

A. We have reviewed top titles for over 15 years from every leading publisher as a book recommendation site. We’re one of the leading book recommendation sites and online bookstore and have a vast following and newsletter audience of over 500,000 as well as very busy sites with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month. We do not guarantee positive reviews, unfavourable reviews can be taken as valuable feedback for improvements and ultimately will not be published on our site. This is why our readers trust us and why our endorsement is so meaningful.

Q. How will you choose my review Ambassador?

A. To ensure our ambassadors are reading the genres they enjoy and create the best environment for favourable feedback we send regular emails to our ambassadors with the latest submissions and they select the books they want to read.

Q. How can I send my book to you for review?

A. We prefer sending digital copies online but can also accept hard copies in most cases if you send us an email to [email protected]

Q. Will my review be positive?

A. We guarantee at least one review but do not guarantee that the review will be positive. If we did, it would not help you or our readers in the long run. Unfavourable reviews can be taken as valuable feedback for improvements but ultimately will not be published on our site. This is why our readers trust us and why our endorsement is so meaningful.

Q. What genres do you accept for review?

A. We accept any type of book, from self-help to religious books to fiction. Our panel of ambassadors have a diverse range of reading preferences. We would however advise that this system is not suitable for specialised or academic texts.

Q. Do you review kids books?

A. Yes. LoveReading4Kids.co.uk is one of the leading children's book review sites and is now also an online bookstore. We have thousands of children's book reviewers on our consumer panel and well-respected children's book ambassadors on our elite panel.

Q. How long will it take to receive my review?

A. Your Ambassador review is guaranteed within 4 weeks for our expedited package and 8 weeks for our standard package. Reviewers from our consumer panel are sent within a monthly newsletter so vary but we normally ask our consumer reviewers to review books within 4 weeks of receiving them.

Q. Do you only review self-published books?

A. No. With these particular packages we review self-published books and books from small to medium publishers.

Q. Do you review Audiobooks?

A. We can, but please email [email protected] at the time of your submission so that we can work through the process with you and ensure that we deliver your feedback within the correct time frame.

Q. How do I pay for this service?

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Literary Review

The current issue, march 2012 issue - out now.

In This Issue: John Gray on Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century • Elaine Showalter on the first Pop Age • Donald Rayfield on Belarus • Praveen Swami on Sharia law • A C Grayling: What are Universities For? • The Letters of Joseph Roth • Jane Ridley on the Queen • Seamus Perry on the poetry of translation • Jonathan Fenby on Mao • Richard Holloway on religion for atheists • John Sutherland on growing old • Frances Wilson on cruelty and laughter and much, much more…

February 2024

View contents table.

‘This magazine is flush with tight, smart writing.’ Washington Post

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in central London.

Literary Review covers the most important and interesting books published each month, from history and biography to fiction and travel. The magazine was founded in 1979 and is based in London.

Highlights from the Current Issue

February 2024, Issue 526 Stuart Jeffries on Hannah Arendt * Norma Clarke on Thomas Hardy * Rosemary Ashton on death & the Victorians * Richard V Reeves on equality * Jeremy Harte on the last peasants * Charles Foster on animal communication *  Jason Goodwin on Istanbul * Donald Rayfield on the Russian Civil War * Kathryn Hughes on brat cats * Tim Hornyak on Japanese gangsters * James Le Fanu on gene therapy * Jude Cook on Howard Jacobson * Richard Canning on Michael Cunningham * Michael Taylor on slavery *  Craig Clunas on Orientalism *  Michael White on political diaries * H Kumarasingham on Labour's first government * Nicholas Clee on publishing then & now *  and much, much more…

Stuart Jeffries

We are free to change the world: hannah arendt’s lessons in love and disobedience, by lyndsey stonebridge.

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘saw an ancient crime in modern garb, and portrayed Eichmann as the latest monster in the long history of anti-Semitism who had simply used novel methods to take hatred for Jews to a new level’. Arendt thought otherwise. Adolf Eichmann was on trial after being captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Israel to face charges of being a leading organiser of the Holocaust. Arendt was there to report on the trial for the New Yorker. ...  read more

More Articles from this Issue

Norma clarke, hardy women: mother, sisters, wives, muses, by paula byrne.

The title of Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women is a pun on Thomas Hardy’s name and a gesture to the enthusiasm that greeted Hardy’s fictional women. Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure were new kinds of women, and Hardy’s fame, which was immense...  read more

The title of Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women is a pun on Thomas Hardy’s name and a gesture to the enthusiasm that greeted Hardy’s fictional women. Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd , Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure were new kinds of women, and Hardy’s fame, which was immense and began with the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd , rested to a large extent on the heroines he created. One young reader wrote to him of Tess, ‘I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.’ Hardy’s discontented wife Emma wondered at it too. She observed, ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’

It is the ‘others’ that Byrne turns her attention to in this ambitious book, split, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles , into three ‘phases’: ‘The women who made him’ (forty-six chapters, mostly named after different women), ‘The women he made’ (eight chapters) and ‘The women he loved and the women he lost’ (seventeen chapters). Stories told by women who knew Hardy or whose foremothers knew him ‘have often been ignored or simply not believed’, Byrne writes. There is also the fact that Hardy made a bonfire of many relevant documents, including the journal ‘What I Think of My Husband’ that Emma left for him to discover after her death in 1912. Real women ‘paid a large price’, Byrne argues, for the ‘magnificent fictional women he invented’. They ‘shaped his passions and his imagination’.  

Rosemary Ashton

Rites of passage: death and mourning in victorian britain, by judith flanders.

Judith Flanders has undertaken a mammoth task. The Victorian period is widely known for its excessive, sometimes scarcely believable interest in death and everything that surrounds it. There are so many set pieces involving death in the fiction of the era, particularly the scenes of children dying in Dickens’s writings. The demise of Little Nell...  read more

Judith Flanders has undertaken a mammoth task. The Victorian period is widely known for its excessive, sometimes scarcely believable interest in death and everything that surrounds it. There are so many set pieces involving death in the fiction of the era, particularly the scenes of children dying in Dickens’s writings. The demise of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop notoriously caused grown men to weep on both sides of the Atlantic when the book was serialised in 1840–41. The protracted dying of poor Jo the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House (1852–3) shows Dickens putting sentiment surrounding the death of a child to good use in the cause of political and social criticism. The narrator sums up the terrible life and death of this destitute child, one of so many ‘dying thus around us every day’. And who is being addressed here? ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order.’ Thus far, a modern reader is likely to be wholly on Dickens’s side as he lambasts those in authority for doing nothing for the poor. But, as Flanders points out in one of many sharp literary critical insights in her book, the young doctor, Allan Woodcourt, who finds Jo dying in the street ‘does not do anything as medically prosaic as taking his pulse or attempting a diagnosis’, but rather ‘helps the child stumble his way through the Lord’s Prayer’. The narrator’s attitude towards this is unclear. Is Dickens satirising the apparent favouring of piety over practical medical help or accepting that it is too late to do anything and endorsing the piety, even though it is directed at a child who knows nothing of the Christian faith?  

Lest we think that Dickens exaggerates the details of death and dying in his time, Flanders finds examples from real life to put beside the death of Jo. These show how wide a gulf exists between at least some modern and some Victorian attitudes. Priscilla Maurice, sister of the theologian Frederick Denison Maurice, published a successful work in 1851 entitled Sickness: Its Trials and Blessings . In it, she suggests that those caring for the sick and dying should ‘speak to them of sin, of pardon, of “the blood of Christ which cleanest from all sin”’. The most celebrated – if that is the word – Victorian response to a death was Queen Victoria’s lifelong mourning of her husband, Albert, who died in 1861, when she was forty-two. Flanders calls her ‘the woman who lived with the dead’. It is well known that she wore black for the rest of her life and refused for many years to perform the usual duties of the monarch. Flanders offers some startling details: Victoria apparently had 231 portraits of Albert – paintings, drawings, etchings and photographs – in her private rooms at Windsor Castle but none of her grandchildren; she wore black to the wedding of her son the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863, looking away from both them and the camera in the commemorative photograph of the event. Unlike many modern commentators, however, Flanders is not scornful of Victoria’s behaviour. She notices how, in a letter written to the prime minister Lord John Russell in 1866, Victoria accepted that the public had a right to expect her to attend the state opening of Parliament but confessed that she simply could not face being ‘dragged in deep mourning, alone in State as a Show’.  

A great strength of Flanders’s book is that she offers us an exotic peepshow of the most striking Victorian customs relating to dying, death, funerals and burials while at the same time showing empathy with those, rich and poor, who were trying, as we all do, to find ways of dealing with grief and honouring the dead. She also notes that not all Victorians followed the most extreme forms of mourning. In the 1840s, crape became the most popular material for mourning dress for those who could afford it. It was to be worn by widows for a year during the period of deepest mourning. This was to be followed by two more stages, until finally other colours were permitted to be worn. For some, this was taking things too far. In 1844 the writer Thomas Hood published in Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany a satire cruelly entitled ‘The House of Mourning: A Farce’. A husband and wife visiting London from the country look around one of the shops dealing exclusively with mourning dress. The assistant takes them through the departments for the different stages of mourning, moving at last from the ‘Intermediate Sorrow Department’ to one where they find a fabric called ‘a Gleam of Comfort’, which is intended for the final stage. Others who showed scepticism towards such customs, and who condemned the commercialisation of death through the sale of special clothing, cards, flowers and jewellery, are also quoted. They include Dickens, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, and the Punch writers who made a living by adopting a default position of satire and ridicule.  

Flanders takes us through the period’s many advances and how these affected ways of dealing with death. We are reminded of discoveries and improvements in political representation, education, transport, sanitation, medicine, lighting, printing, manufacturing and photography. A fine example of Flanders’s ability to hold in mind the different ways in which changes and continuities can coexist is her discussion of burial routines. Until the Burial Acts of the 1850s, certain groups suffered injustices. The poor could not afford the fee for burial in a churchyard, Dissenters were obliged to pay parish rates to the Church of England, whose services they did not attend, and some clergymen refused to bury children who had not been baptised. As things got better through legislation, an alternative to burial became the subject of agitation among those who had a different advance in mind. These, many of them doctors, wished to allow cremation on grounds of either religious scepticism or sanitation, especially in view of the rapid increase in urban populations and the ease with which contagious diseases spread among them.  

Then there were the ‘resurrection men’, who made a rough living from pulling dead bodies from graves and selling them to professors for the teaching of anatomy. The most famous of these were the notorious Edinburgh murderers Burke and Hare, whose case led to the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832. This made provision for medical professors to acquire dead bodies without having to resort to buying them from disreputable sources (previously, they had been permitted to obtain only the bodies of executed criminals).  

Flanders considers the case of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher and begetter of the famous principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Bentham took his philosophy, his reforming ideas and his lack of religious belief to the point of leaving his body to a physician friend, Thomas Southwood Smith, to be publicly dissected and preserved for posterity. It happened that he died in 1832, the year of the Anatomy Act. Southwood Smith did as he was bidden. He dissected the body in public, put together the skeleton, seated it in Bentham’s usual chair, dressed it in his clothes and placed it in ‘an appropriate box or case’, as Bentham had directed him to do. Bentham’s ‘Auto-Icon’ now sits in its box in University College London, the founders of which were inspired by his reformist ideas. Bentham’s intentions were mixed: he wished his body to be of scientific use; he approved of widening education beyond the upper- and middle-class elites; and, like anyone else, he simply wanted to be remembered after his death. He even acquired the customary mourning rings for his friends and had cuttings of his hair distributed, as any pious, non-reformist contemporary would have done. Flanders never forgets the human aspect of the Victorians as she richly documents their varied ways of coping with death.

Richard V Reeves

Equality: the history of an elusive idea, by darrin m mcmahon.

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones tourists come for. But the most significant image is the least dramatic. Fourteen individuals gather closely together, watching a lone figure departing from the group...  read more

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones tourists come for. But the most significant image is the least dramatic. Fourteen individuals gather closely together, watching a lone figure departing from the group. It appears to be an ostracism – a social death, not a physical one.

The hunter-gatherer tribes of that era were perhaps the most equal communities in human history. But this egalitarianism was strictly bounded. Individuals who were not part of the tribe or who broke its norms were cast out or killed. Inclusion required exclusion.

In a famous essay, the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen pointed out that we are all in favour of equality. We just disagree about whether we mean equality of money, or power, or respect, or legal standing, or whatever. The question is ‘equality of what?’ But there is an even deeper question than this: ‘equality of whom ?’ Where is the line between those considered as equals and those who are not – between the fourteen and the one?

This is the question animating Equality , a landmark work of intellectual history by Dartmouth historian Darrin McMahon. ‘Time and again we have seen controversies play out over equality’s “substance” and the degree to which it could admit of difference,’ McMahon writes. ‘Did equality imply common religious or national belonging? Was it delimited by sex, title, or race? Or did it free up individuals to make claims on the collective regardless of the fortunes of their birth?’

It is easy to invoke equality without facing its limits. Contra John Lennon, it is actually very hard to imagine a world with no countries. ‘For all the high-minded talk of “global equality” in recent times’, McMahon writes, ‘its contours have most often been imagined from within the walls of nation-states, where equality extends only to those who share a passport and more often than not a place of birth.’

McMahon has set himself an almost impossible task: to analyse humanity’s most powerful and contested idea throughout history and across the globe. Most attempts at total histories of ideas fail. Depth is sacrificed to achieve breadth, the reader is marched along too strict a chronological path or the author gets stuck in an etymological quagmire. But McMahon succeeds. This book is deeply researched, tightly argued and sparklingly written. It ought to be read by anyone interested in equality, and also anyone interested in people, history, God, politics, religion, nationalism, war or love.

The book is structured around what McMahon calls ‘figures’ of equality, a term he uses in the rhetorical sense of a ‘figure of speech’. These figures are explored in roughly chronological order, from ‘Reversal’, the overturning by hunter-gatherers of the dominance of our ape ancestors, all the way to ‘Dream’, the invoking by 20th-century reformers such as Martin Luther King of a new concept of equality founded on universal brotherhood. The only downside of this approach is that it involves a degree of repetition.

There’s no romanticisation in these pages. Not only did hunter-gatherers kill or expel in order to maintain order, they also formed hierarchies. Or rather, hierarchies formed them. McMahon insists that hierarchies are everywhere in human history, just as they exist in every primate community. Human beings ‘cannot live without hierarchies’, he writes, since ‘status is part of the air we breathe’.

One of the big advantages of human hierarchies is their diversity: there’s more than one way to be top dog. McMahon writes that ‘unlike animals, we regularly inhabit multiple hierarchies at once, with the result that a low-status individual in one environment, say a janitor at a corporation, may be a high-status individual, the captain of the company softball team, in another’. This insight is not developed, but it is critical. One way to square equality with hierarchies is to scramble them, not only over generations but also over the course of an average day. In other words, you defang hierarchies not by denying them but by multiplying them.

While hierarchy is a human constant, the term itself is of Christian origin. One of the most important Early Church fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, coined the term, describing hierarchy as part of God’s ‘perfect arrangement’, especially in the celestial realm – there are, after all, archangels as well as mere angels – and the ecclesiastical one, with archbishops above bishops, and so on.

But at the same time, religion in general (and Christianity in particular) has been among the most propulsive forces for equality in the last two millennia. Both Jews and Christians learn that each of us is made in the image of God. Early Christians lived essentially as communists, while Early Church leaders, following Christ’s example, were outspoken critics of the wealthy. St Basil the Great, for example, told his fourth-century congregation in Caesarea that ‘the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love’ and that a rich person who failed to help a poor person was a ‘murderer’.

McMahon explores the role of trinitarian theology as a foundation for equality. The triune Christian God consists of three separate persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) who are ‘consubstantial’, sharing the same essence (or substance), and therefore equal. This idea helps Christians to explain how people can be unique, separate individuals and yet made of the same divine stuff and therefore equals. ‘God’s children … likewise share a common nature,’ McMahon writes. ‘The mystery of the Trinity seemed to reaffirm the essential likeness of human beings in relation to one another – seemed to reaffirm their essential equality – however different they might be.’

To modern readers, much of this might seem like the stuff of a Sunday school lesson. But while it is clear that for much of modern history the Church has not been a good advertisement for equality, it is also clear that much modern egalitarian thinking rests on theological foundations. As McMahon writes of 18th-century reform efforts, ‘The very fact that equality was on the horizon at all owed much to these varied Christian efforts. Over the course of centuries, Christians had made of equality a moral good, investing it with a sacral status … Equal was how God had made us; equal was how God intended his beloved to be.’

St Paul famously claimed that the incarnation demolished old distinctions, so that ‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus’. But the question for Christians is the same as the question for all those advocating equality: what does the word mean in the real world, in the thick of daily life, for politics and economics? McMahon notes that religious claims of equality often had little purchase in the material world. St Paul instructed Christians to obey their earthly masters. There was no condemnation of slavery as an institution. Master and slave were equal in God’s eyes. But right here and right now, their position was unchanged.

The Roman Empire in which Christianity flourished had its own abstract ideal of equality under natural law for all male Roman citizens, omnes homines aequales sunt (‘all men are equal’), a principle that became part of the legal code itself under Emperor Justinian. McMahon distils the partnership between secular and religious forces: ‘Thus did the Roman law and Christian theology work together, each in its own way, to situate equality amid inequality, while concealing inequality in equality itself. The one justified the other. And as both the empire of Christianity and the empire of Rome grew, so did that complementary and reinforcing function.’

The question of what makes up the substance of equality occupied the finest theologians for centuries. It is central for secular egalitarians too. And some of the deepest thinkers on this question come not from the Left but from the Right. Perhaps McMahon’s greatest achievement is to take the equality claims of the Right, including those on its extreme end, seriously. The origin of the word ‘fascism’ is fascis , the term for a bundle of rods with a protruding blade. This was an emblem of magisterial power in ancient Rome but also of connection, community and equality. There are fasces flanking the speaker’s rostrum in the US House of Representatives. There is a fascis underneath each of Abraham Lincoln’s hands in his memorial sculpture in Washington, DC.

The fascists of the 20th century were dismissive of liberal versions of equality, in part because these ducked the hard realities that must be faced to achieve equality within a group: first, a clear definition of that group; second, the deliberate exclusion of others. Fascist thinkers were explicit about the exclusionary implications of equality. The Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt wrote in 1923 that ‘the question of equality is precisely not one of abstract, logical-arithmetical games. It is about the substance of equality.’ What would this substance be? Schmitt said it could vary. It could be religion, belief, nationhood, tradition or ‘ideas of common race’. But the key concept was ‘equality of type’, or Artgleichheit . The idea of the Volk provided a broad umbrella, shaped by common history, culture, language and experience. But, over time, fascist thinking, especially in Germany, developed a more explicitly racial typology, leading to the genocidal implementation of Schmitt’s argument that, to flourish, societies require ‘the elimination or eradication of heterogeneity’.

The success of fascist politics was down to its clear signalling of who would be the winners, the equals, in a new political order. Fascist scholars and leaders understood that the desire for recognition within a necessarily unequal society created resentment, which could be amplified and weaponised. Drawing on the work of the Dutch scholar Menno ter Braak (who committed suicide in 1940 rather than live under Nazi rule), McMahon offers a chilling but necessary reminder: ‘Where the belief in equality prevailed, resentment would find a place. With the consequence that democratic societies would always produce a steady stream of the very poison that could be used to kill them off.’ The desire to be seen and valued can curdle into reaction and hatred. ‘All human beings seek recognition,’ McMahon writes. ‘And as populist politicians of the Right have arguably understood far better than most in recent years, politics is well placed to provide it.’

The rancour of modern politics is an obstacle to the practical pursuit of greater equality. Right-wing nationalists are dusting off the playbooks of the 1920s and 1930s, whether they admit it (or even know it) or not. In the face of growing concerns over immigration, the proto-fascist French thinker Maurice Barrès wrote at the end of the 19th century, ‘the idea of the fatherland implies an inequality, but to the detriment of foreigners, not, as is the case today, to the detriment of French nationals.’ Meanwhile, too many on the Left are practising a rancorous identity politics of their own, in which, as McMahon writes, ‘white heterosexual men are cast as uncertain allies and privileged exceptions to the rest of humanity’.

There is some hard politics ahead of us, for sure. If we are to stand any chance of cultivating a humane reimagining of equality, we will have to do some hard thinking too.

Donald Rayfield

A nasty little war: the west’s fight to reverse the russian revolution, by anna reid.

Nasty, certainly, but little? The Western intervention in the Russian Civil War, intended to reverse the Bolshevik coup, to restore Russia as an ally in the closing years of the First World War and to create an orderly state harmless to the West and its empires, lasted for four years and extended across a sixth of the earth. While far fewer troops...  read more

Nasty, certainly, but little? The Western intervention in the Russian Civil War, intended to reverse the Bolshevik coup, to restore Russia as an ally in the closing years of the First World War and to create an orderly state harmless to the West and its empires, lasted for four years and extended across a sixth of the earth. While far fewer troops were engaged here than on the Western Front, hundreds of thousands of British, American, French, Japanese, Czech and German soldiers were involved. As Anna Reid rightly concludes, this was a highly discreditable adventure: it stemmed from the same ignorance of the forces taking part and the territory invaded that destroyed Napoleon’s Grande Armée in 1812.

Initially there was little appetite for intervention: Russia’s withdrawal from the Allied effort in 1917 was alarming, but British and French forces could hardly have compelled a million demoralised Russian peasants to return to the slaughterhouse of the Eastern Front. In any case, the arrival of the American army in 1918 made up for the desertion of the Russians. Nevertheless, early in the intervention clumsy efforts were made by British agents, notably that loose cannon Robert Bruce Lockhart, to persuade the Bolsheviks to rejoin the war in exchange for recognition.

The sober sceptics of the West, the US president Woodrow Wilson and the British prime minister David Lloyd George, would have preferred to let Russia sort itself out and to do no more than observe. The militants, the French president Georges Clemenceau and Winston Churchill (demoted from First Lord of the Admiralty after the disastrous debacle at Gallipoli to minister of munitions), were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the intervention, Clemenceau because he loathed revolutionaries, Churchill having been carried away by his own rhetoric about the Russians being ‘cannibals’ and ‘hyenas’ and because of his propensity to unfold maps and ignore the scale. By mid-1918 the Bolsheviks held Moscow, Petrograd and a few other central cities, while (more or less) White armies occupied vast swathes of territory to the east in Siberia, to the west in Ukraine, to the north in the Arctic and to the south on the lower Volga and in the North Caucasus. The Bolsheviks thus seemed surrounded on all four sides, but Churchill failed to see that a thousand miles of territory (not to mention irreconcilable personal and ideological differences) separated the White armies from one another. To any objective observer, intervention was madness: doomed to fail, to stimulate hostility among Russians to the outside world and to rally support for the Bolsheviks.

Reid brings an ironic wit to the gung-ho adventurism of the juvenile or superannuated officers that Britain and America sent to Russia, as well as the atrocities they turned a blind eye to or were even complicit in. Anti-Semitism was rampant among the Whites, not just the Cossacks, who had been massacring Jews since the days of their hero Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1596–1657), but also educated Russian noblemen. So virulent and widespread was this hatred that Jews among the British and American ‘advisers’ were ostracised and even threatened. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were robbed, raped, tortured and murdered by the Whites. These pogroms were, says Reid, ‘a rehearsal for the Holocaust’. Some of the Cossacks who perpetrated these crimes would help the Nazis murder more Jews in 1941 and 1942. (A few made their way to Britain in 1946 – I had a Ukrainian landlord in Cambridge who regularly read a pro-Nazi Ukrainian newspaper, Shturmach , and whose only complaint about England was the number of Jews and Gypsies there.)

Reid has scoured not just the neglected memoirs but also the letters home, diaries and reports written by the interventionists. She shows how they massaged impressions and facts, presenting connivance in criminality as a jolly character-building exercise. From start to end, the intervention was mired in corruption. Few nurses but many wives and girlfriends of officers wore the thousands of nurses’ uniforms and shoes sent to Russia; munitions were either surrendered to the Reds or left to rust. The British behaved worse than the Germans, who in 1918 virtually controlled the politics of the Baltic States, Ukraine, Crimea and Georgia; outside the Baltic States, some German commanders showed competence and even humanity. The same qualities were displayed by the Czech legion of ex-prisoners of war, who in their odyssey seized the Trans-Siberian Railway and forced their way from Europe to Vladivostok in order to board ships for home. They killed and stole very little and showed compassion to Russian refugees.

Reid presents a persuasive picture of Churchill as irresponsible, domineering, inconstant and as full of absurd and mendacious rhetoric as Boris Johnson. Churchill abetted the worst mistakes of the intervention; it is a miracle that he repaired his reputation to the extent that, twenty years later, Britain called on him to save the country.  

Many interventionists believed that Russian officers were lazy, self-pitying and pompous, but that their soldiers, given British training and discipline, were a fine group of men. Only when these soldiers deserted or rebelled, sometimes killing their foreign advisers, was this view modified. A second misconception, which rapidly disappeared, was that the Whites were somehow united; in fact, they ranged from democratic parliamentarians (soon eliminated) to reactionary royalists and fascists avant la lettre . Countless miniature civil wars were fought within the main one. The view of the Finnic peoples as peace-loving backwoodsmen was shattered when the British saw Karelian women battering Finnish soldiers to death with their oars before turning them into scarecrows by stuffing their skins with leaves. The British troops sent to Baku under Major-General Dunsterville to save the oil wells from Germans, Turks and Bolsheviks witnessed constant massacres of Armenians by Azeris and vice versa. Reid also proves that the Soviet story that the British were responsible for the extrajudicial killing of twenty-six Azerbaijani commissars is in fact true, though the British carried out the executions by proxy.

Reid’s main achievement is to tell a very complex story, often grim and atrocious, in a convincing, gripping way. She maintains her sense of humour along with her indignation, making telling analogies with the West’s ongoing intervention (with munitions and money, not men) in Ukraine. Her judgement is right: behind the scenes, the West was from the start preparing to trade with Bolshevik Russia.  

Like many peripheral wars, the intervention was experimental: for the first time a new kind of gas bomb called the M Device was used. Fifty thousand of these were dropped around Archangel and Murmansk, most of which landed without exploding and poisoned the surrounding rivers. Collaborating with the Whites, the British and Americans learned the value of terror – mass shootings, the destruction of villages and towns – in fighting irregulars and guerrillas. In later interventions, including in Vietnam, Western forces put into effect the lessons learned in Russia. Politicians who digest this book will reflect that intervention in any conflict involving determined armed antagonists is likely to end badly.

Jeremy Harte

Remembering peasants: a personal history of a vanished world, by patrick joyce.

Don’t impress me with peasant virtues, said Chekhov, I have peasant blood in my veins. Patrick Joyce has the blood too. His people won a living from the hard lands of Dúiche Seoighe, or Joyce Country, which stretch from Loughs Corrib and Mask to the Atlantic Ocean and straddle the border of County Mayo and County Galway. Although his father...  read more

Don’t impress me with peasant virtues, said Chekhov, I have peasant blood in my veins. Patrick Joyce has the blood too. His people won a living from the hard lands of Dúiche Seoighe, or Joyce Country, which stretch from Loughs Corrib and Mask to the Atlantic Ocean and straddle the border of County Mayo and County Galway. Although his father took the family to England in 1930, he brought his sons back every year and they would fall asleep night after night listening to kitchen talk in English and Irish. Joyce knows what he is talking about, and if his peasants are not always virtuous, they are at least vivid and real.

It is hard to hold on to that reality, for peasants will soon be as extinct as the aurochs and Irish elk. In western Europe, the proportion of the population employed in agriculture now stands at something between 1 and 5 per cent. It is lowest in England, the first country to replace its land-holding agrarian workers with a wage-earning rural proletariat. The ‘ag labs’ of Victorian census entries might romantically be called peasants, but they lacked the two key features of that class: self-supporting work and rights in the land that is worked.

Wealth in a peasant society is accumulated produce. Nothing is sold, unless to pay rents and taxes or to buy a few necessary goods. The peasant economy is a subsistence one, though it does not necessarily provide a bare subsistence, for the good house, with butter in the churn and beer in the barrel, feeds itself from its own resources. But the bitch of poverty is never more than half-asleep. Always the thought of famine drives the man behind the plough team, and those who have no team have to be their own oxen, dragging the plough with ropes that cut their backs, for the land has to be tilled somehow. The endless labour takes its toll on the body, so that Gascons bitterly talk of a man being as straight as a sickle. The opposite of the good peasant is not the weak or thoughtless individual, but the one who gives up the struggle completely. A remote Joyce cousin was remembered as the man who drank away three farms. And for those who cannot afford drink, there is always the rope in the barn and the black well in the courtyard.

Peasants have never had much power, but they do have land, and they have stayed on the land because they have to: if the peasant lays down his hoe, everyone starves. The definition of good tenure is not low rent or profits, but inheritance. The land should pass unimpeded from father to son, if it can be said to pass at all, for the elders never quite die: they are buried not far away and live on in talk. The landless, who have no real home, stand outside peasant culture. Like ghosts trying to become men, they snatch at any opportunity, however arduous or precarious, to get a piece of land.

Historically, the heart of the land-holding was the fireside. From that warm centre order was laboriously driven outwards, pushing back winter, hunger, darkness and death. Fire was the emblem of home and had always to be treated with respect, like the old people, and it had their wisdom, each spark or crackle predicting something. We can call this superstition but such beliefs mattered, not necessarily because they revealed the truth, but because they told you how the world should be. They asserted community between the living and the dead, between home and the world, between man and beast.  

Magic and faith are parallel, not opposite, in the peasant mind, giving answers when cattle sicken, crops fail and the state takes sons away to war. Magic restores the boundaries of a good, productive life after crisis has broken through them. It is not that peasants have a faith surviving from pre-Christian times, but that under all regimes – pagan, Christian, communist – they have placed their trust in a sacramental world. Peasants think through material things. Their tools have been used for so long that they become moulded to the hand that wields them. They have a kind of personality, and in fairy tales they act and talk. It is to the poorest of the peasants, to shepherds and to children that Mary appears, promising that hard times will come no more.

Peasant children learn through the disciplined observation of others at work in field and farm. As soon as their bodies are ready, they must put aside childishness and work, though the terror felt by a seven-year-old left alone in the fields at night might linger in the adult mind. Self-control is everything – it is necessary to see much and say little, remembering that language, like fire, can do great harm if it is not contained. Wit is mistrusted; wordplay is avoided; the individual is subsumed in the figures of Father and Mother. Eat slowly, because you are not a beggar to snatch at nourishment, and speak soberly, because you are not a fool to laugh at nothing. We can admire the grave solemnity of this world, though we wouldn’t necessarily want to live in it.

And not many did. It was not just hunger that drove emigration. Women, who had most to lose, left first. A society afraid of change and risk must crush dangerous ambitions, and for subordinates like women and the young, the crushing could be absolute. Those who could not get away, the deprived of the deprived, had nothing left but dramatised catatonia, exemplified by the tarantism of the Salento peninsula in southern Italy. Joyce approaches such rituals with great sympathy, sensitively reading testimony and photographs alike. It is the areas of greatest poverty that hold his gaze: Polish Galicia, Connemara, the Mezzogiorno. Such places have drawn ethnographers too. Happy peasants have attracted few biographers.

Joyce is a historian of the particular, not the general. Occasionally he writes as if there were an essential, universal peasant type, but then he will break off with counterexamples. His book is held together not by social theory, but by the triangulation of the Ireland in which he grew up, the Poland with which he has become familiar and vivid passages from literature. Much of what he calls peasant ways might be said to have pertained to most preindustrial workers, or to anyone living in the countryside. His historical frame seldom reaches back further than the earliest photograph, and it would take a book of another kind to do credit to the rustici of the Middle Ages, who cleared Europe of wood and fen.

For a grandson of peasants to write about peasants is a devotional act, even when he draws on the skill set of the social historian. Joyce writes with a split consciousness, like a man recounting his dreams. It was so real, this lost life, and yet it is impossible to recapture, for we today cannot think as they did, or even know the world as it was experienced though their weary bent bodies. How should we remember peasants? Not with uncritical admiration, certainly, and not with empty sentiment, but with respect for those lost generations who with axe and mattock and spade hewed out our world.

John Burnside

By hisham matar.

Towards the beginning of My Friends, two Libyan men come together in London, possibly for the last time. As they prepare to part (the older of the two, Hosam, is about to emigrate to California; the younger, Khaled, will remain in the city where he has lived in exile his entire adult life), Khaled remembers a remark his companion made many months earlier, when the hopes of the Arab Spring were still tangible...  read more

Towards the beginning of My Friends , two Libyan men come together in London, possibly for the last time. As they prepare to part (the older of the two, Hosam, is about to emigrate to California; the younger, Khaled, will remain in the city where he has lived in exile his entire adult life), Khaled remembers a remark his companion made many months earlier, when the hopes of the Arab Spring were still tangible: ‘“We are in a tide,” he had said … when he was trying to convince me to return to Benghazi with him, “in it and of it. As foolish to think we are free of history as it would be of gravity.”’  

For years, going back to his childhood, the presence of history has haunted Khaled. As a promising eighteen-year-old with a highly prized scholarship to study abroad, he was shocked by his normally even-tempered father’s near-desperate parting demand that he avoid politics at all costs: ‘“Don’t be lured in,” he said, the words emanating from his very core … The pupils of his eyes turned small and dark and slowly, in a barely audible tone, he said, “Don’t. Be. Lured. In.”’

This warning is reinforced by the first person Khaled meets at Edinburgh University, a fellow student from the beach resort of Zuwara whose only intention is to enjoy a few years abroad, as far from his dull hometown as possible: ‘“You see,” he said, “I have resigned myself to the fact that I live in a world of unreasonable men and the only reasonable thing to do in this situation is, best we can, avoid their schemes.”’ Initially, Khaled is inclined to agree with this proposition: unreasonable men come in many guises, but few were as ruthless as those employed by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to imprison, torture and assassinate dissenters, at home and abroad, during his bloody rule. Besides, at this point, his only reason for being in Edinburgh is to study the literature he loves (the ‘friends’ of the title refers as much to dead writers, to Joseph Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al Sayyab, as to any of Khaled’s contemporaries).  

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Can you achieve equality without imposing inequalities along the way? @RichardvReeves probes the paradoxes of equality

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Richard V Reeves: Why Some Are More Equal Than Others - Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea by Darrin M McMahon

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'One moment workaday tabbies were ambient pest-controllers and called things like Tom and Puss, the next they were lounging on cushions in the drawing room and answering to Lord Fluffy and Little Bunny Teedle Tit' When did our cats turn into brats?

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Stuart Jeffries: Anatomist of Evil - We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience by Lyndsey Stonebridge

Get Paid to Read: 18 Legitimate Sites That Pay Reviewers

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Get paid to read: 18 legitimate sites that pay reviewers.

Get Paid to Read: 18 Legitimate Sites That Pay Reviewers

Serious question: do you want to get paid to read? You might laugh it off at first, thinking that that sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. You can get paid for spending time on what you love: reading books. 

Of course, the key to this #hack is book reviewing, where you offer your personal opinion of a book after you’re done with it. (If you’d like to learn more, check out this post to discover how to write a book review .) Because books are constantly being published, book reviewers are generally always in demand. 

So whether you’re a voracious reader of nonfiction, genre fiction, classics, or indie books, there’s probably an outlet that’s willing to compensate you if you read (review) for them! Without further ado, here’s a definitive list of the 17 sites that will help you get paid to read. If you want to cut to the chase and find out which of them is the right fit for you, we recommend first taking this quick quiz:

Which review community should you join?

Find out which review community is best for your style. Takes 30 seconds!

Then read on for the full list of all of the ways to get paid while reading!

 1. Kirkus Media

💸 Pay: Freelance basis

👀 More information: Check here

If you’ve ever lingered on a book’s Amazon page before, you’ll have heard of Kirkus Reviews. It’s one of the most respected sources of book reviews out there, publishing many of the blurbs that you’ll see on Amazon, or on the cover of your favorite titles.

You have to wonder: where do all of these reviews come from? That’s where you come into the picture. Kirkus Media lists an open application for book reviewers. As of right now, they’re specifically searching for people who will review English and Spanish-language indie titles. Some of the qualities that they want in reviewers include: experience, a keen eye, and an ability to write about a 350-word review in two weeks’ time.

To apply, simply send your resume and writing samples! You can find out more about this opportunity here .

2. Reedsy Discovery

💸 Pay: Tip basis

A powerhouse in the world of indie books, Reedsy Discovery gives book reviewers the chance to read the latest self-published books before anyone else. You can browse through hundreds of new stories before picking one that piques your interest. And if you’ve built up a brand as a book reviewer on Reedsy Discovery, you can liaise with authors who contact you directly for a review.

Its application process is pretty simple: just complete this form to be selected as a book reviewer. Once you’re accepted, you can start looking through the shelves and reading immediately. One more thing: book reviewers can get tips for their book reviews. Readers can send $1, $3, or $5 as a token of appreciation (which, let’s be honest, all book reviewers deserve more of).

If this system intrigues you, you can “discover” more about how it works on this page .

3. Any Subject Books

Any Subject Books is a full-suite self-publishing service. More importantly for you, it hires book reviewers on a book-by-book basis to help them review new books.

They’re big on in-depth, honest, and objective reviews. No fluff here! They’re also happy to give you books in your preferred genres, so if you’re a voracious reader of war fiction, you won’t typically be asked to read the latest paranormal romance hit (or vice versa).

Sadly, Any Subject Books is not currently open to book reviewer applications, but check back again — this could change at any time.

4. BookBrowse

BookBrowse reviews both adult fiction and nonfiction, and some books for young adults. The site focuses on books that are not only enjoyable to read, with great characters and storylines, but that also leave the reader knowing something about the world they did not before. Reviewers also write a "beyond the book" article for each book they review.

5. Online Book Club

💸 Pay: $5 to $60

Online Book Club’s FAQ begins with a warning for all aspiring book reviewers: “First of all, this is not some crazy online get-rich-quick scheme. You won't get rich and you won't be able to leave your day job.”

That daunting reminder aside, Online Book Club’s setup is pretty reasonable, not to mention straightforward. You’ll get a free copy of the book and you’ll get paid for your review of that book. Moreover, it’s one of the few sites that’s transparent about their payment rates (anywhere between $5 to $60). To begin the sign-up process, simply submit your email here .

6. U.S. Review of Books

U.S. Review of Books is a nation-wide organization that reviews books of all kinds and publishes those reviews in a popular monthly newsletter. The way that it works for a book reviewer is simple: when a book title is posted, reviewers can request to read it and get assigned.

A typical review for U.S. Review of Books is anywhere between 250 and 300 words. They are looking particularly for informed opinions and professionalism in reviews, along with succinctness. To apply, submit a resume, sample work, and two professional references via email. But we’d recommend that you check out some previous examples of their book reviews here to first get a better sense of what they’re looking for.

7. Women’s Review of Books

💸 Pay: $100 per review

Women’s Review of Books is a long-running, highly-respected print publication that’s a part of Wellesley Centers for Women. This feminist magazine has been published for 36 years and is looking for more book reviewers to join their force.

If you plan on writing reviews for Women’s Review of Books , you should be aware that its reviews are published “in the service of action and consciousness.” Most of its writers are also academics, journalists, or book reviewers with some years of experience behind them. If you meet these qualifications and are accepted, you’ll be compensated $100 per review.

To pitch then a review, send them an email with a quick proposal. For more details, click here .

8. eBookFairs

eBookFairs primarily helps authors grow their author platforms, but it also has a Paid Book Reader program where readers can earn money by, you guessed it, reviewing the books listed on their site.

Note that they do have clear instructions on what qualifies as a review, so do read their guidelines carefully before applying to make sure you can meet them. For instance, the review must be at least 250 words, you must allow at least 3 days between reviews submitted, and it must provide helpful feedback for the author. There are also a limited number of paid reader positions available.

💸 Pay: Variable

If you’re a freelancer, you’re probably already familiar with Upwork! One of the biggest marketplaces for freelancers, Upwork has fingers in every industry’s pie. So it won’t be a surprise to learn that people who are looking for freelance book reviewers regularly post listings on its marketplace.

Because each job caters to an individual client, the requirements and qualifications will differ. It might be a one-time project, or the gig might turn into a long-running collaboration with the client. Generally, the listing will specify the book’s genre, so you’ll know what you’re getting before you agree to collaborate with the client on the other end.

To begin, you’ll need to sign up as a freelancer on Upwork. Find out more information on Upwork’s FAQ page!

10. Moody Press

💸 Pay: Free ARCs

Moody Press is a nonprofit publishing house of Christian titles and Bible study resources. If this is your niche, you’ll definitely be interested in Moody Press’ Blogger Review Program! As part of the program, you’ll get free copies of book published by Moody Press.

Like some of the other programs on this list, you won’t get paid for your review, but you will get a free book. Moody Press also asks you to write your honest review within 60 days of reading it. To get a feel for it, try joining the MP Newsroom Bloggers Facebook group , where you can directly interact with existing members of the program.

11. New Pages

💸 Pay: Variable 

Not interested in writing anything longer than 300 words? Are quick flash book reviews more your pace? If so, becoming a NewPages reviewer might be just your speed. NewPages.com is an Internet portal to small presses, independent publishers and bookstores, and literary magazines. More importantly, they’re looking for short book reviews (generally between 100 and 200 words) on any recent literary magazine or book that you’ve read.

If you’re already a fan of books from small presses or unknown magazines, even better: that’s exactly the kind of reviewer NewPages wants to work with. If you’d like to look through some of their past book reviews to see if your style matches, check out their book review archive here .

12. Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly is an online magazine focused on international book publishing and all that that entails. More pertinently, it regularly reviews both traditionally published and self-published books, which means that it does occasionally have a call for book reviewers. As of right now, it’s closed to applications — but if you check its Jobs page every once in a while, you might see an opening again.

13. Tyndale Blog Network

Tyndale Blog Network runs a program called My Reader Rewards Club, which is based on an innovative rewards system. If you join as a member, you can earn points for certain actions that you take on the site (for instance, inviting a friend to the program and sharing a direct link to MyReaderRewardsClub.com on Facebook each fetches you 10 points).

Writing a review for a Tyndale or NavPress book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble gets you 10 points, with a maximum limit of 50 points in 30 days. In turn, you can use your accumulated points to receive more books off of Tyndale’s shelves. If this sounds like something that may be up your alley, check out their FAQ here.

14. Booklist Publications

💸 Pay: $12.50 to $15 per review

Booklist is the American Library Association’s highly respected review journal for librarians. Luckily for freelance writers, Booklist assigns freelance book reviews that vary from blog posts for The Booklist Reader to published book review in Booklist magazine.

As the site itself suggests, it’s important that you’re familiar with Booklist Publication’s outlets (which include Booklist magazine, the quarterly Book Links , and The Booklist Reader blog) and its writing style. Reviews are generally very short (no longer than 175 words) and professionally written. You can discover more of its guidelines here — and an archive of previous Booklist reviews here .

To apply, contact a relevant Booklist editor and be prepared to submit a few of your past writing samples.

15. Instaread

💸 Pay: $100 per summary

Not interested in writing critical takes on the books that you read? Then Instaread might be for you. Instaread has an open call for book summaries, which recap “the key insights of new and classic nonfiction.”

Each summary should be around 1000 to 1500 words, which makes it a fair bit lengthier than your average flash book review. However, Instaread will compensate you heartily for it: as of 2019, Instaread pays $100 for each summary that you write. You can peruse Instaread’s recommended Style Guide on this page , or download Instaread from your App Store to get a better feel for the app.

16. NetGalley

If you’ve dreamt about becoming an influencer in the book reviewing community, you may want to give NetGalley a look. Put simply, NetGalley is a service that connects book reviewers to publishers and authors. Librarians, bloggers, booksellers, media professionals, and educators can all sign up to NetGalley to read books before they’re published.

How it works is pretty simple. Publishers put digital review copies out on NetGalley for perusal, where NetGalley’s members can request to read, review, and recommend them. It’s a win-win for both publisher and reviewer: the publisher is able to find enthusiastic readers to provide an honest review for their books, and the reviewer gets access to a vast catalog of books.

The cherry on top is that NetGalley membership is 100% free! Simply use this form to sign up. And if you’d like more information, you can dip into their FAQ here .

17. getAbstract

Are you an avid reader of nonfiction books? getAbstract is a site that summarizes 18,000+ nonfiction books into 10-minute bites. Their Career Opportunities page often includes listings for writers. At the time of this post’s writing, getAbstract is looking for science and technology writers who can sum up the latest magazine articles and books. They pay on a freelance basis, so apply through their website to get further details.

18. Writerful Books

💸 Pay: $10 to $50

Writerful Books is an author services company that provides everything from beta reading to (you guessed it) book reviewing. As such, they’re always on the lookout for book reviewers with fresh and compelling voices.  

One of the benefits of this gig is that you can review any book that you want for them (although they prefer contemporary award-winning American, Australian, British, Canadian, Irish, and New Zealand authors). Getting a regularly paid gig with Writerful Books isn’t a guarantee, but if you regularly publish quality reviews for them, they may contact you. 

To apply, you’ll have to be able to provide previous book review samples. Here’s the job listing if you’re curious to learn more about this role.

If you're an avid reader,  sign up to Reedsy Discovery  for access to the freshest new reads — or  apply as a reviewer  to give us  your  hot takes!

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9 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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It’s too early to know the full story behind the mass shooting at yesterday’s Super Bowl parade in Kansas City, but for the back story — the broader context of America’s love affair with guns and the resulting steady drumbeat of horrific incidents — you might look to two of our recommended books this week: Dominic Erdozain’s “One Nation Under Guns” and Jonathan M. Metzl’s “What We’ve Become,” which take cleareyed but different approaches to the country’s gun culture and its intractable challenges.

Also up this week, we recommend a couple of big biographies, of the choreographer Martha Graham and the Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon, along with a memoir of undocumented immigration and a true-crime history about a 1931 murder that exposed a network of political corruption. In poetry, we recommend Mary Jo Bang’s latest collection, and in fiction we like new novels by Paul Theroux and the British writer Dolly Alderton. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

ONE NATION UNDER GUNS: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy Dominic Erdozain

This galvanizing polemic by a historian appalled at American gun violence scrutinizes the historical record to show where contemporary interpretations of the Second Amendment have departed from the framers’ apparent intentions, with disastrous results.

review books uk

“Considers guns from cultural, legal and historical perspectives. ... So comprehensive and assured that the moment I finished it, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again.”

From Rachel Louise Snyder’s review

Crown | $28

WHAT WE’VE BECOME: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms Jonathan M. Metzl

Homing in on a mass shooting at a Nashville Waffle House in 2018, Metzl, a psychiatrist and sociologist, argues that America’s gun violence epidemic requires us to address racial and political tensions deeply embedded in our history.

review books uk

“Casts a wide net. ... How, he asks, have public health experts failed to effect changes in policy, given their thousands of studies devoted to the myriad ways firearms increase risk and danger?”

Norton | $29.99

THE REBEL’S CLINIC: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon Adam Shatz

This absorbing biography of the Black psychiatrist, writer and revolutionary Frantz Fanon highlights a side of him that’s often eclipsed by his image as a zealous partisan — that of the caring doctor, who ran a secret clinic for Algerian rebels.

review books uk

“Part of what gives ‘The Rebel’s Clinic’ its intellectual heft is Shatz’s willingness to write into such tensions…. Portrays a man whose penchant for ‘rhetorical extremity’ could obscure how horrified he was by the brutality he had seen.”

From Jennifer Szalai’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $32

GOOD MATERIAL Dolly Alderton

Alderton’s novel, about a 35-year-old struggling to make sense of a breakup, delivers the most delightful aspects of romantic comedy — snappy dialogue, realistic relationship dynamics, funny meet-cutes and misunderstandings — and leaves behind clichéd gender roles and the traditional marriage plot.

review books uk

“Alderton excels at portraying nonromantic intimate relationships with tenderness and authenticity.”

From Katie J.M. Baker review

Knopf | $28

ERRAND INTO THE MAZE: The Life and Works of Martha Graham Deborah Jowitt

In the hands of a veteran dance critic, this rigorous biography excels at describing the flamboyant choreographer’s work and distinct style. About the messy life between performances, Jowitt is comparatively mild.

review books uk

“A study in balance and grace. ... A distinguished biography: its description rich, its author’s rigor unquestionable.”

From Alexandra Jacobs’s review

Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $35

THE BISHOP AND THE BUTTERFLY: Murder, Politics and the End of the Jazz Age Michael Wolraich

The 1931 murder of “Broadway Butterfly” Vivian Gordon exposed an explosive story of graft, corruption and entrapment that went all the way to the top of the state. Wolraich brings a journalist’s eye and a novelist’s elegance to this story of Jazz Age New York.

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“A disquieting reminder of how tragedy can be used to effect change, but also how it is often leveraged for advancement.”

From Lesley M.M. Blume’s review

Union Square | $28.99

MY SIDE OF THE RIVER: A Memoir Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez

When Gutierrez was 4, her parents moved the family from Mexico to Arizona in hopes of giving their children better opportunities than they would have had in their “violent little narco town.” In this moving, timely memoir, she considers the ripple effects of that decision.

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“A testament to the abiding allure — and often daunting reality — of the American dream.”

From Julia Scheeres’s review

St. Martin’s | $29

BURMA SAHIB Paul Theroux

This novel explores George Orwell’s years in colonial Burma, where he trained and worked as a police officer in the 1920s. Theroux’s Orwell is uneasy about his job and repelled by the British ruling class. But these experiences, the book suggests, made Orwell into the sharp thinker he became.

review books uk

“The Burma that he conjures in these pages is wonderfully present in lush and dense prose. ... Theroux is now in his early 80s and this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre.”

From William Boyd’s review

Mariner | $30

A FILM IN WHICH I PLAY EVERYONE Mary Jo Bang

The poems in Bang’s latest collection, her ninth, are full of pleasure, color, sound and light — but also torment.

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“The work of miniaturizing a life is painstaking, and Bang’s poems have a characteristic clockwork precision — they tick and spin like mechanical music boxes.”

From Elisa Gabbert’s poetry column

Graywolf | Paperback, $17

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The Independent

Book Review: New collaborative novel ‘Fourteen Days’ proves the pandemic couldn’t curb creativity

A lmost four years since COVID-19 became a household term, a new work of fiction proves that even a global pandemic can’t curb creativity.

“Fourteen Steps” is billed as a “collaborative novel.” Edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston , the book was written by 36 American and Canadian authors. Many of the names will be familiar to readers. In addition to Atwood, contributors include Emma Donoghue , Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Celeste Ng, R.L. Stine and Scott Turow. Preston wrote the frame narrative that pulls the stories together into a novel with a plot, conflicts and a surprising resolution of its own.

Consisting of 14 chapters dated from March 31 to April 13, 2020, the book tells the story of how the residents of the Fernsby Arms, “a decaying, crapshack tenement” on Manhattan’s Lower East Side “that should have been torn down long ago,” spent the early weeks of the lockdown. They don’t have much in common except for their residence and the fact they were unable to get out of town during the pandemic like more affluent city dwellers did. Assembling on the rooftop to bang pots and pans in appreciation of the healthcare heroes during their shift change, the characters decide to spend each evening storytelling. They haul their own furniture to the roof, sit six feet apart, and share.

Multiple stories are squeezed into each chapter, some just a page or two long. The writing is unattributed except at the end, but most readers will enjoy flipping to the back after reading a story so they can give the author credit. The narrator is the building’s superintendent, and she’s inherited a binder left behind by the previous super in which he described many of the tenants, assigning them nicknames. “‘She is the Lady with the Rings,’ he wrote of the tenant in 2D. ‘She will have rings and things and fine array.’” Or: “5C: He is Eurovision, a man who refuses to be what he isn’t.” The new super, who calls herself “1A,” decides to add to the binder by recording and writing down the stories she hears on the roof.

Those stories, as one might expect given three dozen writers, are a mixed bag. There are lengthy jokes, a smattering of horror, some nonfiction, even romances, poetry and parables. Befitting their oral delivery in the book, they sort of wash over you as a reader. A few chapters later and you just remember things like “a nurse who can smell death,” “an amputee blues guitarist” or “how the plague was instrumental in launching Shakespeare’s career in the late 16th century.”

The thing they have in common is the same thing shared by the three dozen writers of this collaborative novel — they’re an attempt to “make sense of the senseless and bring order to disorder,” as the editors write in their preface. They’re proof that the stories we leave behind are what makes us human.

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Keir Starmer by Tom Baldwin review — this biography should be called Nightmares From My Father

The making of ‘superboy’: the great revelation of this biography is just how traumatic a childhood the labour leader suffered.

The biography reveals Keir Starmer’s difficult relationship with his cold, irascible and distant father

Challenge yourself with today’s puzzles.

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T wo years ago, Sir Keir Starmer announced that he was to write the story of his life. It was thought by some in the Labour leader’s office that a book might give him some positive definition in the eyes of a nonplussed public. The handful of shadow cabinet ministers who were told about the project thought it dangerously stupid. British prime ministers do not write memoirs before they are elected. Too presumptuous. Too gauche. Too American. Anyone who wishes to live in the White House must record their childhood in an airport hardback, but not every candidate can be Barack Obama and none of their books can be Dreams From My Father . Most pile up unread like orders of service at an empty funeral.

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The day Starmer nearly resigned — thanks to Boris Johnson

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Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

  • Will Douglas Heaven archive page

In the biggest mass-market AI launch yet, Google is rolling out Gemini , its family of large language models, across almost all its products, from Android to the iOS Google app to Gmail to Docs and more. You can also now get your hands on Gemini Ultra, the most powerful version of the model, for the first time.  

With this launch, Google is sunsetting Bard , the company's answer to ChatGPT. Bard, which has been powered by a version of Gemini since December, will now be known as Gemini too.  

ChatGPT , released by Microsoft-backed OpenAI just 14 months ago, changed people’s expectations of what computers could do. Google, which has been racing to catch up ever since, unveiled its Gemini family of models in December. They are multimodal large language models that can interact with you via voice, image, and text. Google claimed that its own benchmarking showed that Gemini could outperform OpenAI's multimodal model, GPT-4, on a range of standard tests. But the margins were slim. 

By baking Gemini into its ubiquitous products, Google is hoping to make up lost ground. “Every launch is big, but this one is the biggest yet,” Sissie Hsiao, Google vice president and general manager of Google Assistant and Bard (now Gemini), said in a press conference yesterday. “We think this is one of the most profound ways that we’re going to advance our company’s mission.”

But some will have to wait longer than others to play with Google’s new toys. The company has announced rollouts in the US and East Asia but said nothing about when the Android and iOS apps will come to the UK or the rest of Europe. This may be because the company is waiting for the EU’s new AI Act to be set in stone, says Dragoș Tudorache, a Romanian politician and member of the European Parliament, who was a key negotiator on the law.

“We’re working with local regulators to make sure that we’re abiding by local regime requirements before we can expand,” Hsiao said. “Rest assured, we are absolutely working on it and I hope we’ll be able to announce expansion very, very soon.”

How can you get it? Gemini Pro, Google’s middle-tier model that has been available via Bard since December, will continue to be available for free on the web at gemini.google.com (rather than bard.google.com). But now there is a mobile app as well.

If you have an Android device, you can either download the Gemini app or opt in to an upgrade in Google Assistant. This will let you call up Gemini in the same way that you use Google Assistant: by pressing the power button, swiping from the corner of the screen, or saying “Hey, Google!” iOS users can download the Google app, which will now include Gemini.

Gemini will pop up as an overlay on your screen, where you can ask it questions or give it instructions about whatever’s on your phone at the time, such as summarizing an article or generating a caption for a photo.  

Finally, Google is launching a paid-for service called Gemini Advanced. This comes bundled in a subscription costing $19.99 a month that the company is calling the Google One Premium AI Plan. It combines the perks of the existing Google One Premium Plan, such as 2TB of extra storage, with access to Google's most powerful model, Gemini Ultra, for the first time. This will compete with OpenAI’s paid-for service, ChatGPT Plus, which buys you access to the more powerful GPT-4 (rather than the default GPT-3.5) for $20 a month.

At some point soon (Google didn't say exactly when) this subscription will also unlock Gemini across Google’s Workspace apps like Docs, Sheets, and Slides, where it works as a smart assistant similar to the GPT-4-powered Copilot that Microsoft is trialing in Office 365.

When can you get it? The free Gemini app (powered by Gemini Pro) is available from today in English in the US. Starting next week, you’ll be able to access it across the Asia Pacific region in English and in Japanese and Korean. But there is no word on when the app will come to the UK, countries in the EU, or Switzerland.

Gemini Advanced (the paid-for service that gives access to Gemini Ultra) is available in English in more than 150 countries, including the UK and EU (but not France). Google says it is analyzing local requirements and fine-tuning Gemini for cultural nuance in different countries. But the company promises that more languages and regions are coming.

What can you do with it? Google says it has developed its Gemini products with the help of more than 100 testers and power users. At the press conference yesterday, Google execs outlined a handful of use cases, such as getting Gemini to help write a cover letter for a job application. “This can help you come across as more professional and increase your relevance to recruiters,” said Google’s vice president for product management, Kristina Behr.

Or you could take a picture of your flat tire and ask Gemini how to fix it. A more elaborate example involved Gemini managing a snack rota for the parents of kids on a soccer team. Gemini would come up with a schedule for who should bring snacks and when, help you email other parents, and then field their replies. In future versions, Gemini will be able to draw on data in your Google Drive that could help manage carpooling around game schedules, Behr said.   

But we should expect people to come up with a lot more uses themselves. “I’m really excited to see how people around the world are going to push the envelope on this AI,” Hsaio said.

Is it safe? Google has been working hard to make sure its products are safe to use. But no amount of testing can anticipate all the ways that tech will get used and misused once it is released. In the last few months, Meta saw people use its image-making app to produce pictures of Mickey Mouse with guns and SpongeBob SquarePants flying a jet into two towers. Others used Microsoft’s image-making software to create fake pornographic images of Taylor Swift .

The AI Act aims to mitigate some—but not all—of these problems. For example, it requires the makers of powerful AI like Gemini to build in safeguards, such as watermarking for generated images and steps to avoid reproducing copyrighted material. Google says that all images generated by its products will include its SynthID watermarks. 

Like most companies, Google was knocked onto the back foot when ChatGPT arrived. Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI has given it a boost over its old rival. But with Gemini, Google has come back strong: this is the slickest packaging of this generation’s tech yet. 

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Generative AI tools like ChatGPT reached mass adoption in record time, and reset the course of an entire industry.

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  • Melissa Heikkilä archive page

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Deploying high-performance, energy-efficient AI

Investments into downsized infrastructure can help enterprises reap the benefits of AI while mitigating energy consumption, says corporate VP and GM of data center platform engineering and architecture at Intel, Zane Ball.

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Richard Osman – he is standing outdoors with light shining through blurred trees in background, and is wearing a dark jacket, black jumper and black-rimmed glasses; he has a short greying beard and swept-back light brown hair

Richard Osman to publish first novel in new crime series

We Solve Murders introduces a new detective duo – but the author has not abandoned his Thursday Murder Club characters

A new crime series by Richard Osman called We Solve Murders has been announced, after the huge success of his Thursday Murder Club novels.

The beloved elderly sleuths from the Pointless presenter’s bestselling series are taking a break for now. “I put them through quite a lot in the last book, The Last Devil to Die, so I’ve given them a year just to relax, kick back, rejuvenate. But they’ll be coming back in 2025,” Osman said.

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman.

In the meantime, We Solve Murders, which is published this autumn, will introduce the father-in-law and daughter-in-law detective duo Steve and Amy Wheeler. The title references the name of the detective agency the pair set up, after Amy, a private security officer, discovers a dead body and a bag of money while working on a remote tropical island. Steve has retired from the police and runs a small investigations agency in a New Forest village where “he’ll do the odd insurance job or finding a lost dog”.

“But if he never sees another murder, I think he’d be very happy,” Osman said, describing the new book to the Guardian. Amy is in her 30s and Steve in his 50s, “so, for me, very young,” he joked. But the fact that Steve is retired appealed to him, he said, as he was interested in the way that just when you think you know what the next stage of your life looks like, “life often has other ideas for you”.

Starting a new series was “nerve-racking”, Osman said, but necessary: “I hope to be writing until I’m 90, and that would mean I’d have to do 40 Thursday Murder Club books, so probably I need to write about other worlds.”

The cover of the new book features a cat – Steve’s beloved pet, Trouble. “Anyone with a cat at home, wherever they are in the world, whatever time they’re having, they always go, oh, I’d quite like to get back to the cat,” Osman said, explaining that he and his wife, Ingrid, always wondered if their cat Liesl missed them when they were on holiday. Throughout the novel, Steve “essentially just wants to leave the trouble of the world behind and get back to the cat called Trouble”.

Osman will continue this series in tandem with the Thursday Murder Club books, which he plans to keep writing “for as long as people want to read them”. When writing about Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, “I just find myself being entertained by them,” he said. “So I’m not about to kill any of them off.”

That said, he is enjoying developing a new cast of characters, and doesn’t rule out embarking on other series in the future. “I would always do something that’s crime or mystery based, but I hope I’ve got all sorts of things ahead of me.”

Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has sold 10m copies globally, and all four books in the series so far have broken UK sales records. The first Thursday Murder Club novel is being adapted into a film by Stephen Spielberg’s company. We Solve Murders is due to be published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on 12 September 2024.

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