On an unusually sunny, cool summer day in London, Mary-Kay Wilmers, 81, was at work in a large, light-filled loft in Bloomsbury, home to the offices of what she calls “the paper” and its readers call the L.R.B.: The London Review of Books. Petite, silver hair cut distinctively in a short bob, Wilmers had brought a copy of the latest issue — Volume 41, Number 13 — to a bright back room and a desk laden with current British newspapers and magazines. On the cover of The Sun, a photo of Taylor Swift adjoined the headline “Migrant’s 3,500-ft Plunge: Falling Jet Stowaway Lands 3ft From Sunbather.” On the cover of The Times, next to a close-up of a young woman delighting in a rainbow ice pop, ran the headline “Oxfam Staff Still Offering Aid for Sex, Report Claims.” Wilmers’s copy of the L.R.B. featured no photos of women on its cover. Instead, a painting, unblemished by text, depicting an early summer evening in London: dirty pink twilight dissolving behind a stand of trees, deep, unnatural blue overtaking the sky, two silhouetted birds coursing above overground wires. Pretty, striking and, when read with the hot pink headline incised above it — “The Sun Sets on Britain” — a different picture altogether.
