Search Results

Advanced Search

166 to 180 of 188 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Say hello to Rodney

Peter Wollen: How art becomes kitsch, 17 February 2000

The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience 
by Celeste Olalquiaga.
Bloomsbury, 321 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 7475 4535 9
Show More
Show More
... as a ‘Nature Gem’ really all that different from an ‘Atlantis’ reconstructed on a Bahamian beach or the fake ruins of Hubert Robert, both of which she gives as examples of kitsch, just because one is real, the others fake, one melancholic, the others nostalgic? Both categories of object seem to me to trade on the viewer’s engrained sentiments and ...

Kipling and Modernism

Craig Raine, 6 August 1992

... grey’. In each example, Kipling’s language is patently not inert, but, like the harp of True Thomas, birls and brattles in Kipling’s hands. We think of Kipling as a special, borderline case, but he is not. Arnold memorably damn ed Pope and Dryden as ‘classics of our prose’ in his essay ‘The Study of Poetry’, a critical manoeuvre Eliot then used ...

Darkness Audible

Nicholas Spice, 11 February 1993

Benjamin Britten 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Faber, 680 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 571 14324 5
Show More
Show More
... of himself’ and having ‘regained his innocence ... can go calmly to his death’. Neither Thomas Mann’s novella nor Britten’s treatment of it give an ounce of support for these readings. The imprisonment of Aschenbach’s mind in the maze of desire is imaged in the maze of Venice, a closed-in world, fetid with the stench of plague. Britten’s ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...

Love-of-One’s-Life Department

Terry Castle: The lesbian scarcity economy, 21 October 2004

Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives and Loves of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks 
by Diana Souhami.
Weidenfeld, 224 pp., £18.99, July 2004, 9780297643869
Show More
Show More
... site in the lesbian imagination. Stein and Toklas, Barney, Romaine Brooks, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach, Dolly Wilde, Janet Flanner, H.D. – we’ve been hearing about them for ages and the line-up never changes. If anything, thanks to influential (and romanticising) books like Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank (1986) and Andrea Weiss’s Paris Was a ...

Tinkering

Mark Greif: Walt Disney, 7 June 2007

Walt Disney: The Biography 
by Neal Gabler.
Aurum, 766 pp., £25, May 2007, 978 1 84513 277 4
Show More
The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney 
by Michael Barrier.
California, 393 pp., £18.95, April 2007, 978 0 520 24117 6
Show More
Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson 
by Tom Sito.
Kentucky, 440 pp., £19.95, September 2006, 0 8131 2407 7
Show More
Show More
... are known for having made great work by such inartistic means. One is the naive artist: the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson reputedly arranged his masterpiece, Pet Sounds, by sitting all day with a small orchestra and singing each instrumentalist his part. He’d have the ensemble perform, then he’d make alterations, listen again, and so forth, until the ...

In Farageland

James Meek, 9 October 2014

... the Tories. ‘In seaside areas, traditionally, politics have been quite fluid,’ said Norman Thomas, who produces Thanet Watch, a local investigative magazine. ‘There’s a feeling that lots of Tories are waiting to see which way the wind blows before jumping ship to Ukip.’ Thomas believes those most likely to vote ...
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years 
by Brian Boyd.
Chatto, 783 pp., £25, January 1992, 0 7011 3701 0
Show More
Show More
... the seeker for black pearls, the man who prefers the monsters of the deep to the sunshades on the beach, will find in The Overcoat shadows linking our state of existence to those other states and modes we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception ... At this superhigh level of art, literature is of course not concerned with pitying the ...

Real Busters

Tom Crewe: Sickert Grows Up, 18 August 2022

Walter Sickert 
Tate Britain, until 18 September 2022Show More
Walter Sickert: The Theatre of Life 
edited by Matthew Travers.
Piano Nobile, 184 pp., £60, October 2021, 978 1 901192 59 9
Show More
Sickert: A Life in Art 
by Charlotte Keenan McDonald.
National Museums Liverpool, 104 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 902700 63 2
Show More
Show More
... tones of the doorframe and the road in the foreground; and a panel showing tourists on the beach, the tents and the sea related by a tinny blue, and the clouds created out of the colours of the sand and the women’s dresses. In these works, Sickert was deploying Whistler’s preferred alla prima, or ‘wet on wet’, technique, which Whistler also ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... in the pyramid gave entry to a network of underground tunnels. The fabled Chinese Limehouse of Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, of Oscar Wilde’s opium dens, has long gone. And now the Good Friends restaurant in Salmon Lane, to which hungry diners travelled from all over the city, has followed them: converted into a store for building supplies. The spirit of ...

Notes on a Notebook

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 September 1999

... By the time I got to Belfast and phoned him again the line was dead. 13. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, a known figure in the IRA, was gunned down at his home on 19 March 1920. The late-night callers were three members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. One of them was later identified as District-Inspector Oswald Swanzy. The Chief Secretary for ...

Come and Stay

Arnold Rattenbury, 27 November 1997

England and the Octopus 
by Clough Williams-Ellis.
CPRE, 220 pp., £10.95, December 1996, 0 946044 50 3
Show More
Clough Williams-Ellis: RIBA Drawings Monograph No 2 
by Richard Haslam.
Academy, 112 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 1 85490 430 2
Show More
Clough Williams-Ellis: The Architect of Portmeirion 
by Jonah Jones.
Seren, 204 pp., £9.95, December 1996, 1 85411 166 3
Show More
Show More
... Water restaurant in Cobham, on top of Snowdon, for the Romney’s House extension, on Criccieth beach; Swedish Classical at Bishop’s Stortford, Oxford, Belfast; Baroque at Bushmills or, over-hurriedly, less successfully, at Stowe. While it is true that he could gag up – the phrase we all preferred was ‘clough up’ – that pair of ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... A jolt of paranoia. They have cruised down the Lea Valley from Lippitt’s Hill Camp at High Beach, a base right beside John Clare’s Epping Forest asylum, and they’ll be back again tomorrow. Sukhdev Sandhu, who flew with the sky cops for his book Night Haunts, called the experience ‘the panoptic sublime’. The machines cost half a million pounds ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... making him seem like an American saviour who took a bullet for his own people.The shooter, Thomas Crooks, was wearing a T-shirt for a YouTube channel called DemolitionRanch, which has 11.7 million subscribers. He was a registered Republican who donated $15 to ActBlue, a register-to-vote pressure group. He was killed instantly by Secret Service snipers ...

After George W. Bush, the Deluge

Murray Sayle: Back to the Carboniferous, 21 June 2001

Draft Report of the 17th Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Nairobi, 4-6 April 2001 
Show More
Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability 
Show More
The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming 
by David Victor.
Princeton, 192 pp., £12.95, April 2001, 0 691 08870 5
Show More
Managing the Planet: The Politics of the New Millennium 
by Norman Moss.
Earthscan, 232 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 1 85383 644 3
Show More
Show More
... designer gas Freon, properly chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), developed in 1930 by the American chemist Thomas Midgley for General Motors Frigidaire as a substitute for the poisonous liquid ammonia previously used in refrigerators. Freon is almost chemically inert, non-poisonous; it boils at room temperature. It did a great job in the air conditioners that were ...

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