Search Results

136 to 15 of 244 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

William Wallace, Unionist

Colin Kidd: The Idea of Devolution, 23 March 2006

State of the Union: Unionism and the Alternatives in the United Kingdom since 1707 
by Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan.
Oxford, 283 pp., £45, September 2005, 0 19 925820 1
Show More
Show More
... the United Kingdom parliament. Sharing devolved government with the Liberal Democrats is a small price to pay for that. Seven years on from the first elections to the Scottish Parliament, it seems that devolution has soothed the nationalist itch. Yet, as Iain McLean and Alistair McMillan recognise in their study of the unionist political tradition, this ...

Michael Gove recommends ...

Robert Hanks: Dennis Wheatley, 20 January 2011

The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley 
by Phil Baker.
Dedalus, 699 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 903517 75 8
Show More
Show More
... credible chains of motive and causation were beyond him. He was a writer of the ‘With one bound, Jack was free’ school; the gun that inexplicably jams, the knock at the door at the very second the blade is about to fall were his stock-in-trade. But abundance trumps incoherence, and it can’t be denied that an awful lot happens in The Forbidden ...

Diary

John Lanchester: Online Goodies, 25 April 2002

... their audiences with tales of the devastation being brought by advances in copying technology. Jack Valenti, the impressively lifelike head of the Motion Picture Association of America – one-time former fixer in the LBJ White House, recently chair of the Hollywood summit to discuss ways of supporting the war against terrorism – curdled our blood twenty ...

I’m being a singer

Andrew O’Hagan: Dandy Highwaymen, 8 October 2020

Sweet Dreams: The Story of the New Romantics 
by Dylan Jones.
Faber, 663 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 0 571 35343 9
Show More
Show More
... Hadley, the Thatcherite singer in an otherwise left-leaning band, was holding a glass of Jack Daniels. He seemed in touch with his audience and every bit as drunk. I’m not sure whether the audience knew his politics, but they heard the totemic sound of the 1980s in his voice, and a thousand facets of contemporary Britain seemed to sparkle in his ...

Sleeves Full of Raisins

Tom Johnson: Mobs of Wreckers, 13 April 2023

Shipwrecks and the Bounty of the Sea 
by David Cressy.
Oxford, 313 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 19 286339 3
Show More
Show More
... Hyland enjoyed marvellous success with his ‘dramatick piece’ The Ship-Wreck of 1746, in which Jack Lookout and Tom Plunder prey on the ship of Captain Bluff, entangling Farmer Careful with the bureaucrats Mr Search’em and Mr Pick’em. There is as much hauling-to-mainsail, Huzzah!-ing, and whoring as you would hope, with a dash of political commentary ...

I wish she’d been a dog

Elaine Showalter, 7 February 1991

Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart 
by Charlotte Margolis Goodman.
Texas, 394 pp., $24.95, May 1990, 0 292 74022 0
Show More
Jean Stafford: A Biography 
by David Roberts.
Chatto, 494 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7011 3010 5
Show More
Show More
... state of near-mystical terror about the invasion and pillaging of her brain, ‘her treasure whose price he, not more than the nurses, could estimate’. In some way Stafford felt herself not only damaged but violated. Yet she fought against understanding her own anger, diverting it as much into meanness and booze as into art; indeed, she would have been ...

Strangers

John Lanchester, 11 July 1991

Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon 
edited by Stephen Egger.
Praeger, 250 pp., £33.50, October 1990, 0 275 92986 8
Show More
Serial Killers 
by Joel Norris.
Arrow, 333 pp., £4.99, July 1990, 0 09 971750 6
Show More
Life after Life 
by Tony Parker.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.50, May 1991, 0 330 31528 5
Show More
American Psycho 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 399 pp., £6.99, April 1991, 0 330 31992 2
Show More
Dirty Weekend 
by Helen Zahavi.
Macmillan, 185 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 333 54723 3
Show More
Silence of the Lambs 
by Thomas Harris.
Mandarin, 366 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 0 7493 0942 3
Show More
Show More
... one important difference, however. Sutcliffe’s case acted itself out as a reprise of the case of Jack the Ripper, which has lodged itself so tenaciously in the English folk memory: it was a kind of flashback to Victorian England, set in a similar milieu of urban blight, urban deprivation, prostitution, hypocrisy and misogyny. A substantial part of the ...

Diary

Patrick Wright: The Cult of Tyneham, 24 November 1988

... Object lessons included plum pudding, Saint George and the Dragon, posting a letter and the Union Jack. The school calendar was shaped by its special occasions: not just the annual tea provided by the Bonds up at Tyneham House, but the duly observed days of church, nation and state. On Empire Day the school was addressed by a visiting speaker, who ‘tried to ...

Joan and Jill

V.G. Kiernan, 15 October 1981

Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism 
by Marina Warner.
Weidenfeld, 349 pp., £9.95, August 1981, 9780297776383
Show More
Show More
... all its beliefs were crumbling: Jill was in a good position to know how shaky was the house that Jack built. It was a frequent theme of later writings that ‘God had chosen a woman to save France.’ Part Two of the book is called ‘The Afterlife of Joan of Arc’, a story as remarkable in its way as her real life on earth. It was an excellent idea to ...

Theatre-proof

Anne Barton, 2 July 1981

Othello as Tragedy 
by Jane Adamson.
Cambridge, 301 pp., £15, October 1980, 0 521 22368 7
Show More
Shakespeare and Tragedy 
by John Bayley.
Routledge, 228 pp., £9.75, April 1981, 0 7100 0632 2
Show More
Show More
... thought them to be. Iago, however, protects himself more radically. He refuses (at a terrible price) ever to commit himself to another person, to admit any capacity for suffering, or an openness to feelings which cannot be controlled by the will. Although Othello as Tragedy occasionally seems rather long-winded and repetitive, Ms Adamson’s detailed ...

Once a Syrian, always a Syrian

Maria Margaronis: Joseph O’Neill, 8 March 2001

Blood-Dark Track: A Family History 
by Joseph O'Neill.
Granta, 338 pp., £16.99, February 2001, 1 86207 288 4
Show More
Show More
... and sisters were IRA activists, many of them high up in the organisation; Eileen’s brother Jack Lynch was the commanding officer who orchestrated the bombing campaign in England in 1939 which killed six civilians and seriously injured 55. Cheated of his farm inheritance by a series of blunders and family quarrels, Jim O’Neill earned a living as a ...

A Bear Armed with a Gun

David Runciman: The Widening Atlantic, 3 April 2003

Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order 
by Robert Kagan.
Atlantic, 104 pp., £10, March 2003, 1 84354 177 7
Show More
Show More
... all it owes to the freedom fighters that came from the United States of America and everywhere’. Jack Straw took up the theme, declaring: ‘Britain is also a very old country. It was founded in 1066 – by the French.’ Colin Powell had to concede that ‘America is a relatively new country,’ before going on to remind his audience that ‘it is the ...

Not to Be Read without Shuddering

Adam Smyth: The Atheist’s Bible, 20 February 2014

The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed 
by Georges Minois, translated by Lys Ann Weiss.
Chicago, 249 pp., £21, October 2012, 978 0 226 53029 1
Show More
Show More
... imaginary titles such as Near is my King, but nearer is my Skin (‘to be sold at the Sign of the Jack-Pudding’); A Dissertation of the No Power of a No Parliament, making a No King, that will always be doing us No Good; and A New-invented Mathematical Instrument, by the help of which one may discover, that, the higher a Jackanapes climbs, the more he shews ...

A bout de Bogart

Jenny Diski, 19 May 2011

Tough without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey Bogart 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Faber, 288 pp., £14.99, February 2011, 978 0 571 26072 0
Show More
Show More
... Depp prancing around wearing earrings. Mind you, even in the butch 1940s Mickey Rooney, Vincent Price, Clifton Webb and William Powell played nearer to the other end of the man’s men spectrum, to appreciative audiences. To say nothing of pretty-boys Cary Grant and Leslie Howard. Kanfer doesn’t by any means dismiss the argument, but he isn’t sure that ...

Zeitgeist Man

Jenny Diski: Dennis Hopper, 22 March 2012

Dennis Hopper: The Wild Ride of a Hollywood Rebel 
by Peter Winkler.
Robson, 376 pp., £18.99, November 2011, 978 1 84954 165 7
Show More
Show More
... is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice. Vincent Price was too camp to be really alarming, even as the witchfinder general. Peter Lorre was heartbreaking as a child murderer. James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences