Search Results

Advanced Search

151 to 165 of 168 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
Show More
Show More
... of Alexander was now finally at an end. Suddenly, everyone was writing like Xenophon again, or Julius Caesar. Consequently, apart from the citations by literary critics and a remarkable late inscription erected by the ruler of Commagene at Nemrut Dagh in Turkey, which makes even Hegesias seem pedestrian, next to nothing of this singular literary ...

I just let him have his beer

Christopher Tayler: John Williams Made it Work, 19 December 2019

The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, ‘Stoner’ and the Writing Life 
by Charles Shields.
Texas, 305 pp., £23.99, October 2018, 978 1 4773 1736 5
Show More
Nothing but the Night 
by John Williams.
NYRB, 144 pp., $14.95, February 2019, 978 1 68137 307 2
Show More
Show More
... how many cars there would be in a Missouri college town in 1917, or what rhetorical strategies Julius Caesar might employ in a letter to his niece.Nothing but the Night (1948), Williams’s slim first novel, now reprinted, isn’t like that. Williams never showed any interest in resurrecting it, and it isn’t hard to see the reason. Originally ...

Itemised

Fredric Jameson, 8 November 2018

My Struggle: Book 6. The End 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 1153 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 84655 829 0
Show More
Show More
... can put their utterances through quality control first.’‘I remember crying when I read about Julius Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read ...

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... Mann, Döblin, Broch, Brecht – in which Fascism was allegorised into the past, as the rise of Julius Caesar, mobs howling for Augustus, or the killers of the Catholic League, in a deliberately modernising spirit completely at variance with the classical conception of the historical novel. If this was an enclave with few consequences, two works of the ...

Ich dien

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and the Servants, 22 October 2009

Shakespeare, Love and Service 
by David Schalkwyk.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £50, June 2008, 978 0 521 88639 0
Show More
Show More
... the actor-servant is never entirely free from the suspicion that is allowed to surface in Octavius Caesar’s sceptical reaction: ‘O noble weakness!’ Cleopatra’s mastery of ‘excellent dissembling’ may have reduced Pompey, Julius Caesar and Antony in turn to the condition of ‘soldier-servant’, but it is the ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
Show More
Show More
... a Greek who wrote the first known account of ‘Britain’, and he is followed by Julius Caesar (100-44 BC, ‘politician, author and military commander’), one of the first to have thought it was time Britain joined the larger European community. While it is easy to see the merits of taking a fairly relaxed and inclusive view on the ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
Show More
Show More
... voodoo Macbeth in Harlem. Over the next few years, the Mercury Players would mount productions of Julius Caesar, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Cradle Will Rock, Danton’s Death and Native Son. Together with the Group Theater, they were the nerve power of the New York stage in the 1930s and early 1940s. There is a line more traceable than is sometimes ...

Mothers

Jacqueline Rose, 19 June 2014

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women 
by Elisabeth Badinter, translated by Adriana Hunter.
Picador, 224 pp., £10.99, June 2013, 978 1 250 03209 6
Show More
Are You My Mother? 
by Alison Bechdel.
Jonathan Cape, 304 pp., £16.99, May 2012, 978 0 224 09352 1
Show More
A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories 
by Rachel Bowlby.
Oxford, 256 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 0 19 960794 5
Show More
Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome 
by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell.
Texas, 274 pp., £16.99, April 2013, 978 0 292 75434 8
Show More
Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in 20th-Century England 
by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans.
Oxford, 240 pp., £24.99, August 2013, 978 0 19 968198 3
Show More
I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Womanhood 
by Daisy Waugh.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, July 2013, 978 0 297 86876 7
Show More
Show More
... deemed the most desirable of women, was the mother of four children, one, she claimed, by Julius Caesar and the three youngest by Mark Antony, something most representations of Cleopatra conspire not to remember or talk about (no one I have mentioned this to had the faintest idea she was a mother). In fact the silence began with Octavian in a bid ...

Past, Present and Future

A.J. Ayer, 21 January 1982

Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. I: From Parmenides to Wittgenstein 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 141 pp., £10, September 1981, 0 631 12922 7
Show More
Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. II: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 239 pp., £15, September 1981, 0 631 12932 4
Show More
Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 160 pp., £12, September 1981, 0 631 12942 1
Show More
Show More
... perceptions, say of printed letters, to terminate with a belief in some historical event, such as Julius Caesar’s murder. It is the present impression that stops the regress: the historical event is the first link of the chain. The argument should be that eye-witnesses of Caesar’s murder passed the information on ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... irritating. She would quote Shakespeare in a loud voice and make you listen. Sometimes she was Julius Caesar, sometimes Cassio, sometimes Iago and often Othello. You had to stand there and wait until she was finished. The speeches were often long and accompanied by many gestures. She knew these plays because she had seen them acted by Anew McMaster ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... just before she died and thought she looked a bit like Gertrude Stein: stocky, impassive, the same Julius Caesar haircut – only dreamier, blue-eyed, more aerated somehow. Her emotional remoteness seemed absolute.Yet Martin’s story has always enthralled me. Born in rural Saskatchewan in 1912, she moved to New York in the 1940s to study art at ...

Mad for Love

Tobias Gregory: ‘Orlando Furioso’, 9 September 2010

‘Orlando Furioso’: A New Verse Translation 
by Ludovico Ariosto, translated by David Slavitt.
Harvard, 672 pp., £29.95, November 2009, 978 0 674 03535 5
Show More
Show More
... dukes of Ferrara derived from Carolingian knights was no more fanciful than the idea that Augustus Caesar derived from Trojan exiles.) The prestige of Orlando Furioso is enhanced by analogy with the Aeneid; the prestige of the house of Este is enhanced by comparison with Augustus, the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the Roman Empire. But the analogies involved ...

Monumental Folly

Michael Kulikowski: Heliogabalus’ Appetites, 30 November 2023

The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome 
by Harry Sidebottom.
Oneworld, 338 pp., £10.99, October, 978 0 86154 685 5
Show More
Show More
... 180s, Severus commanded a legion in Syria, where he encountered Heliogabalus’ great-grandfather Julius Bassianus of Emesa – modern Homs – in the upper Orontes valley. Originally an Arab foundation, Emesa had a long history of friendly relations with Rome under its native dynasty and, after its absorption into the empire, remained the hinge between the ...

Companions in Toil

Michael Kulikowski: The Praetorian Guard, 4 May 2017

Praetorian: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Imperial Bodyguard 
by Guy de la Bédoyère.
Yale, 336 pp., £25, March 2017, 978 0 300 21895 4
Show More
Show More
... and disbanded, or wiped out in the field, in the battles that brought the Republic down. In 30 BC, Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew Octavian, having eliminated every one of his rivals, inherited an exhausted world gasping for peace. He also inherited hundreds of thousands of men still under arms, not least his own and Mark Antony’s praetorian cohorts. He ...

Little Brits

Tom Shippey: Murder on Hadrian’s Wall, 19 November 2015

The Real Lives of Roman Britain 
by Guy de la Bédoyère.
Yale, 241 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20719 4
Show More
Show More
... the inscriptions that record them provide a narrative that runs in parallel to the histories of Caesar, Tacitus and their successors. They document the lives of ordinary people, slaves and centurions, potters and graffiti writers. Roman tombs have given us the first named face in Britain, the first named woman and the first self-proclaimed Londoner. The ...

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