I started reading the @LRB and scrapbooking my favourite pieces when I was 15. Teenage me wouldn’t have dreamt this.
Clare Bucknell retweeted
“Just because someone is interested in ribbons doesn’t mean he isn’t interested in God. Vermeer’s pictures are often observed to harbor spiritual meanings as well as material ones, flickering back and forth between the two.” —@clarebucknell
harpers.org/archive/2026/07/…
For the July issue of @Harpers, I wrote about Johannes Vermeer and a new biography that I did not love.
harpers.org/archive/2026/07/…
Clare Bucknell retweeted
Blair’s essay is a substantial intervention on what's wrong with Britain & with Labour, with a detailed alternative agenda. Dismissing it is silly. But engaging with it reveals that it's both forward-looking & stuck in the past, with an agenda that is radical but not 'centrist'🧵
Clare Bucknell retweeted
“Pedantry has often been imagined as a physical condition,” @clarebucknell writes. “Accusations of pedantry often take this form because getting to grips with minds is difficult.” go.nybooks.com/4d1VVWv
Clare Bucknell retweeted
I’m praying the first “whom” is a joke ?
Clare Bucknell (@clarebucknell) on whom gets to call whom a pedant go.nybooks.com/4t8IBFZ
for @nybooks I wrote about the long and very weird history of pedantry — incontinent philosophers! slovenly women! a donkey who despite his best efforts can’t read French!
nybooks.com/articles/2026/05…
Clare Bucknell retweeted
This is the best news I’ve seen all week! The St Giles Oxfam bookshop is genuinely the greatest used bookstore in Oxford if not the entire UK. For years, it has become a go-to donation spot for retired academics cleaning out their personal libraries so you can always find delightfully niche material.
Decision on college bid to close Oxfam bookshop ift.tt/z4yTfRp
thrilled that my essay made it onto @GrantaMag’s most-read list for 2025 🎾
granta.com/top-reads-2025-es…
for @nybooks I wrote about some of the earliest female literary critics
nybooks.com/articles/2025/11…
Clare Bucknell retweeted
Some of the Penguin Shakespeare covers illustrated by David Gentleman, born March 11 1930
for the new @nybooks I wrote about Sir John Soane and his museum — inc. how you get a full-size sarcophagus into a London basement
nybooks.com/articles/2025/03…
my first essay for @GrantaMag is in the new Winter issue, free to read for the next couple of days: on real tennis, the niche sport that changed my life
granta.com/real-tennis/
Clare Bucknell retweeted
On the pod: an extended extract from ‘Novel Approaches’, an LRB Close Readings series. @clarebucknell, Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer discuss Thomas Love Peacock’s ‘Crotchet Castle’, and its commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time: lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-video…
With Thomas Jones, I’ll be hosting a new Close Readings podcast for the @LRB this year, Novel Approaches. Each month, joined by a brilliant roster of guests, we’ll sink our teeth into a 19th-century novel. We hope you’ll join us! Here’s an intro episode:
lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-video…
