The London Review of Books is Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from art and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy, not to mention fiction and poetry. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.

As well as book reviews, memoir and reportage, each issue also contains poems, reviews of exhibitions and movies, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary.

David Runciman on the end of our species; Donald MacKenzie on the challenges facing Google; Adam Smyth on Johannes Gutenberg; Niamh Gallagher on the Irish Famine; John Kerrigan on the Atlantic slave trade; and Brett Christophers on the world's waste problems. Plus, a diary by Stephen Phelan and a poem by Jorie Graham.