Hello, everybody, and welcome to this first in a series of birthday conversations at the London Review Bookshop to celebrate 40 years of the London Review of books.

I'm Sam Kinchin-Smith, the LRB's digital editor, and I'm delighted to be joined by two of the paper's most heroic contributors.

Rosemary Hill, a contributing editor is a writer and historian

who has written books about Pugan, Stonehenge, and Angela Carter, which isn't a bad summary

of the kinds of subjects she's written about for the LRB for three decades. A most recent piece,

a fairly scathing review of a cultural history of fatness, is in the issue

on your chairs, as is a diary by Ian Sinclair, his first piece for the paper since his 2017 winter

lecture, The Last London, the last in a series of extraordinary pioneering pieces about London

and its environs that he's contributed to the paper since the early 90s,

many of which have fed into acclaimed books, including Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital,

and Hackney, that Red Rose Empire, Rose Red Empire.

His latest piece isn't about London, it's about Peru.

He's somewhat left London behind, but we've

brought him back for tonight's conversation. The idea of these events is to present the

LRB's contributors and editors in conversation about a subject they've returned to many times in

their writing, to think about it in terms of the LRB and the last 40 years. For this first event, we only got as far as the first word of our name.

Our conversation will be interspersed with readings from Rosemary and Ian of pieces

from the distant and more recent past.

We'll talk for about 50 minutes after which there will be an opportunity for questions.

Rosemary and Ian's books will be on sale after the event, as will our big anniversary book.

I'll under review of books and incomplete history, which we hope you'll buy.

Before we begin, three pieces of housekeeping.

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