Events at the Shop

Over its six years, the London Review Bookshop has hosted an outstanding events programme, with readings, debates and conversations heard by packed houses. Nearly all these events have been recorded for the Bookshop by archivists Common Custom, and we are delighted to be able to make a small selection of these recordings available on this site.

This list will continue to grow over time. If you find you’ve missed another sell-out event, do check back here to catch up.

Launching the Bookshop’s inaugural World Literature Weekend, Hanan al-Shaykh gave a lively reading from her memoir of her mother, The Locust and the Bird, as well as discussing the book with novelist Esther Freud.

As part of Faber & Faber’s 80th anniversary celebrations, the London Review Bookshop welcomed two Faber authors to read from and discuss their first works: Sarah Hall’s début novel Haweswater and Clare Wigfall’s collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing.

Iain Sinclair’s appearance at the Bookshop always heralds a frantic scramble for seats. This event was no different, an opportunity to hear a reading from his new work, Hackney, That Rose Red Empire: A Confidential Report.

A veteran of peace initiatives across the Middle East and beyond, Alistair Crooke provides an account of the wellspring of Islamist movements, a defence of their underpinning intellectual traditions, and a cogent argument for engagement and dialogue.

In conversation with John Sutherland, Hanif Kureishi expanded on and discussed his cogitation on psychoanalysis, Something to Tell You.

Jenny Diski was at the London Review Bookshop to be cheered up, apologise, and read from her latest book, Apology for the Woman Writing, a story drawn from the marginal notes that exist about Marie de Gournay, Montaigne’s editor and onetime ‘stalker’.

The London Review of Books debate at the British Museum, part of the exhibition ‘Hadrian: Empire and Struggle’, saw a panel of historians and theorists discuss what walls can tell us about the political and military uses of architecture and space.