Search Results

Advanced Search

136 to 150 of 214 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

A Whack of Pies

Matthew Bevis: Dear to Mew, 16 December 2021

This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew 
by Julia Copus.
Faber, 464 pp., £25, April 2021, 978 0 571 31353 2
Show More
Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Julia Copus.
Faber, 176 pp., £14.99, October 2019, 978 0 571 31618 2
Show More
Show More
... they knew that it was modern.’ The modernists certainly took to her; she was published alongside James Joyce, positively reviewed by H.D. and praised as being ‘above praise’ by Marianne Moore. ‘If we choose to leave the poems of Charlotte Mew out of our literary heritage,’ ...

Apoplectic Gristle

David Trotter: Wyndham Lewis, 25 January 2001

Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis 
by Paul O'Keeffe.
Cape, 697 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 224 03102 3
Show More
Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer 
by Paul Edwards.
Yale, 583 pp., £40, August 2000, 0 300 08209 6
Show More
Show More
... behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to sue. When, appeased by a row with the ...

The Age of Detesting Trump

David Bromwich, 13 July 2017

... assure the collapse of the Trump administration in the near future. The firing of the FBI director James Comey was the event that brought suspicions to a pitch that will be hard to maintain, and equally hard to scale down. Much of the provocation came from the multiple explanations offered by Trump. Comey was fired, he said at first, because of his mishandling ...

Two Giant Brothers

Amit Chaudhuri: Tagore’s Modernism, 20 April 2006

Selected Poems 
by Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri.
Oxford India, 449 pp., £23.99, April 2004, 0 19 566867 7
Show More
Show More
... the most significant phase of Orientalist scholarship were over. In 1813, Byron had advised Thomas Moore: ‘Stick to the East … it [is] the only poetical policy.’ The ‘policy’ had impelled Byron, Southey and Moore to write about the gul-e-bulbul (the stock Persian metaphor for the nightingale in the garden), and ...

What most I love I bite

Matthew Bevis: Stevie Smith, 28 July 2016

The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith 
edited by Will May.
Faber, 806 pp., £35, October 2015, 978 0 571 31130 9
Show More
Show More
... has all the books, it’s hard to be specific (a Collected Poems as soon as possible, please).’ James MacGibbon’s edition followed in 1975, but it has now been out of print for twenty years. Seamus Heaney reviewed it appreciatively but apologetically: ‘Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre ...

A Bloody Stupid Idea

James Butler: Landlord’s Paradise, 6 May 2021

Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London 
by Owen Hatherley.
Repeater, 264 pp., £10.99, November 2020, 978 1 913462 20 8
Show More
Show More
... campaign that led to the introduction of Section 28. (Thatcher’s authorised biographer, Charles Moore, suggested that her motive was her hatred of local government education policies, as if a legislative exercise in queer-bashing, which blighted the lives of gay children for a generation, were somehow excusable as a means to a worthy end.) In this ...
Dance till the stars come down 
by Frances Spalding.
Hodder, 271 pp., £25, May 1991, 0 340 48555 8
Show More
Keith Vaughan 
by Malcolm Yorke.
Constable, 288 pp., £25, October 1990, 0 09 469780 9
Show More
Show More
... disentangle. To say that his big pictures – the Death of Nelson, Coriolanus, even the Death of James Dean – look like enlarged illustrations is unfair to his real illustrations. He was delighted when he found he could use a big photograph of a drawing on an exhibition stand, and was right to be. His pen marks were much more interesting than his brush ...

An Agreement with Hell

Eric Foner, 20 February 1997

Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution 
by Jack Rakove.
Knopf, 439 pp., $35, April 1996, 0 394 57858 9
Show More
Show More
... Here, he makes a genuine contribution. Looming over Rakove’s account is the figure of James Madison, the diminutive, colourless Virginian who, although never accorded the place in popular memory enjoyed by his contemporaries, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fathered the Constitution and offered the most compelling rationale for ...

On the Sands

Anne Enright: At Sandymount Strand, 26 May 2022

... in this public spot, from rocks that are now buried under the reclaimed land that is Sean Moore Park. After which: ‘He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will.’Later in the day, as the sunset glows over these same rocks, Gerty MacDowell sits in a cosy nook beside the ‘sparkling ...

It’s good to be alive

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Science does ethics, 9 February 2012

Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition and Complexity Are Revolutionising Our View of Human Nature 
by Douglas Kenrick.
Basic, 238 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 0 465 02044 7
Show More
Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values 
by Sam Harris.
Bantam, 291 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 593 06486 3
Show More
The Fair Society: The Science of Human Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice 
by Peter Corning.
Chicago, 237 pp., $27.50, April 2011, 978 0 226 11627 3
Show More
Show More
... worth living. By talking about well-being, he believes he has halted the infinite regress of G.E. Moore’s claim that ‘goodness could not be equated with any property of human experience (e.g. pleasure, happiness, evolutionary fitness) because it would always be appropriate to ask whether the property on offer was itself good.’ (It’s not incidental ...

With Slip and Slapdash

Frank Kermode: Auden’s Prose, 7 February 2008

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Vol. III: Prose, 1949-55 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 779 pp., £29.95, December 2007, 978 0 691 13326 3
Show More
Show More
... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
Show More
The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
Show More
Show More
... and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’; Marianne Moore gave us ‘treasures of eccentricity and authenticity’. It’s an aural trick: if one thing sounds like another, their pairing seems right.Hardwick once admitted that she would read her work and ‘look for a line where I might insert a vivid phrase, or ...

Nora Barnacle: Pictor Ignotus

Sean O’Faolain, 2 August 1984

... to his studio with a snapshot of this young Galway woman who (he said) had eloped with his son James to Paris some eighteen years before. Mossy agreed to copy the photograph in oils, two feet by 18 inches, unframed, for the usual flat rate of five quid, ten bob down, the rest on delivery, asked the usual questions, colour of hair, auburn, colour of ...

Snap among the Witherlings

Michael Hofmann: Wallace Stevens, 22 September 2016

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens 
by Paul Mariani.
Simon and Schuster, 512 pp., £23, May 2016, 978 1 4516 2437 3
Show More
Show More
... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the ...

Going Straight

Neal Ascherson, 17 March 1983

After Long Silence 
by Michael Straight.
Collins, 351 pp., £11.95, March 1983, 0 00 217001 9
Show More
A Matter of Trust: MI5 1945-72 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £8.95, December 1982, 0 297 78253 3
Show More
Show More
... whom the impact of friendship and common intellectual excitement at Cambridge was enormous. When James Klugman and John Cornford, the Panza and Quixote of Cambridge student Communism, came to his rooms in Trinity to recruit him for the Socialist Society, they found a natural, eager joiner. Dazzled by their friendship, he found his way to the Communist core ...

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