Journalism (selected)


‘Invidious Trumpet’, review essay on Joseph Hone, The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers (Chatto), 9 September 2021


‘After-Meditation’, review essay on Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World  (William Collins) and Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, 2nd edn (OUP), London Review of Books, 18 June 2020


‘At least that was the idea: Johnson and Boswell’s Club’, review essay on Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Yale), London Review of Books, 19 October 2019, 17-18


‘Why Robinson Crusoe is really an urban tale’, OUPblog, 23 April 2019

https://blog.oup.com/2019/04/robinson-crusoe-urban-tale/


‘The tortures of adapting Samuel Richardson’s Pamela’, OUPblog, 16 January 2019

https://blog.oup.com/2019/01/tortures-adapting-samuel-richardsons-pamela


‘Bring some Madeira’, review essay on Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky, and Crotchet Castle, ed. Freya Johnston and Matthew Bevis (Cambridge), London Review of Books, 8 February 2018, 23-4

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n03/thomas-keymer/bring-some-madeira


(with other contributors) ‘How to be a great journal editor: advice from eight top academic editors’, Times Higher, 14 December 2017

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/how-be-great-journal-editor-advice-eight-top-academic-editors


‘I now, I then’, review essay on Adam Smyth (ed.), A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge), London Review of Books, 17 August 2017, 39-40

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n16/thomas-keymer/i-now-i-then


‘Fielding and Fake News’, OUPblog, 30 April 2017

https://blog.oup.com/2017/04/fielding-fake-news/


‘Mastering the art of understating your wealth’, review essay on The Literary Correspondence of the Tonsons, ed. Stephen Bernard (Oxford), London Review of Books, 5 May 2016, 21-2

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n09/thomas-keymer/mastering-the-art-of-understating-your-wealth


‘Too many pears: Frances Burney’, review essay on The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney, Volumes III and IV: 1788, ed. Lorna J. Clark (Oxford), London Review of Books, 27 August 2015, 40-1

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n16/thomas-keymer/too-many-pears


‘Illuminating retrievals’, review essay on Steven Moore, The Novel: An Alternative History, 1660-1800 (Bloomsbury) and Thomas G. Pavel, The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton), Times Literary Supplement, 8 August 2014, 10-11


‘Carry up your coffee boldly: Jonathan Swift’, review essay on Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World (Yale); Swift, Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: ‘Polite Conversation’, ‘Directions to Servants’ and Other Works, ed. Valerie Rumbold (Cambridge); Swift, Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, 1710-13, ed. Abigail Williams (Cambridge), London Review of Books, 17 April 2014, 33-4

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/thomas-keymer/carry-up-your-coffee-boldly


‘That corrupting country: Orientalist Jones’, review essay on Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746-1794 (Oxford), London Review of Books, 9 May 2013, 33-4

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n09/thomas-keymer/that-corrupting-country


‘What did she do with those beds?: Eliza Haywood’, review essay on Katherine. R. King, A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood (Pickering & Chatto), London Review of Books, 3 January 2013, 31-2

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/thomas-keymer/what-did-she-do-with-those-beds


‘Samuel Johnson and Human Flight’, OUPblog, 13 December 2012; reprinted in Johnsonian News Letter for March 2013

http://blog.oup.com/2012/12/samuel-johnson-human-flight/


‘Freaks, Dwarfs and Boors: 18th-Century Jokes’, review essay on Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental 18th Century (Chicago), London Review of Books, 2 August 2012, 17-18

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n15/thomas-keymer/freaks-dwarfs-and-boors


‘Spiralling Costs’, review essay on Terry Friedman, The Eighteenth-Century Church in Britain (Yale), Times Literary Supplement, 24 June 2011, 8-9


‘Modest Proposals’, review essay on Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge) plus three related books, Times Literary Supplement, 7 January 2011, 3-5


‘To Enjoy or Endure: Samuel Johnson’s Message to America’, Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 2009, 14-15


‘Cough up: Henry Fielding’, review essay on Henry Fielding, Plays, Volume II, 1732-1734, ed. Thomas Lockwood, and Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, Shamela, and Occasional Writings, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford), London Review of Books (20 November 2008), 32-3

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n22/thomas-keymer/cough-up


‘Rogering in Merryland: the Unspeakable Edmund Curll’, review essay on Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford), London Review of Books (13 December 2007), 32-3

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n24/thomas-keymer/rogering-in-merryland


‘Don’t kill me this morning’, review essay on Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662-1785 (Oxford), Times Literary Supplement (24 March 2006), 24-5


‘Protean prevaricator’, review essay on The Poems of John Dryden, Vols 3 (1686-1693) and 4 (1693- 1696), eds Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Longman) and Steven N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (Cambridge), Times Literary Supplement (23 July 2004), 5-7


‘On not not meaning it’, review essay on Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 (Oxford), Times Literary Supplement (19 October 2001), 12-13