Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Crufts is the biggest dog show in the world with more than 24,000 toy, terrier, pastoral, hound, gundog, utility and working breeds entered for competition this year. For four days the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham becomes a different planet, with its own rules, language, celebrities and newspaper. But what lies behind the decision to favour one Pekingese over another? And with so little prize money on offer, why do people go through the enormous effort of entering a dog at all? Rosa Lyster went to Crufts this year for the LRB to find out what it’s really like.
Read Rosa Lyster on Crufts in the LRB: lrb.me/cruftsyt
Subscribe to the LRB: Get 12 issues for £12 lrb.me/youtube
Thanks to: The Kennel Club, Channel 4, Laura DuForest, Dog Only Nose and The Little Dog Laughed.
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books 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 culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. 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 essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
Crufts is the biggest dog show in the world with more than 24,000 toy, terrier, pastoral, hound, gundog, utility and working breeds entered for competition this year. For four days the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham becomes a different planet, with its own rules, language, celebrities and newspaper. But what lies behind the decision to favour one Pekingese over another? And with so little prize money on offer, why do people go through the enormous effort of entering a dog at all? Rosa Lyster went to Crufts this year for the LRB to find out what it’s really like.
Read Rosa Lyster on Crufts in the LRB: lrb.me/cruftsyt
Subscribe to the LRB: Get 12 issues for £12 lrb.me/youtube
Thanks to: The Kennel Club, Channel 4, Laura DuForest, Dog Only Nose and The Little Dog Laughed.
ABOUT THE LRB
The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books 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 culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. 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 essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.
