Search Results

Advanced Search

181 to 195 of 488 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Trounced

C.H. Sisson, 22 February 1990

C.S. Lewis: A Biography 
by A.N. Wilson.
Collins, 334 pp., £15, February 1990, 0 00 215137 5
Show More
Show More
... college – in the collection of memorabilia of such Christian writers as George MacDonald, T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams and Tolkien. It is evidence of some sort of fame. A.N. Wilson sees ‘unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification which occurred in him towards the end of his days’, but that I do not pretend to be able to ...

Tall Storeys

Patrick Parrinder, 10 December 1987

Life: A User’s Manual 
by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos.
Collins Harvill, 581 pp., £15, October 1987, 0 00 271463 9
Show More
The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room 
by Paul Auster.
Faber, 314 pp., £10.95, November 1987, 0 571 14925 1
Show More
Show More
... The New York Trilogy is steeped in the American urban wasteland as recorded in the early T.S. Eliot, or in Melville’s ‘Bartleby’. In addition, Paul Auster is a gifted parodist who does for the thriller and private-eye novel much of what Henry James in Washington Square did for the amorous ...

Raven’s Odyssey

D.A.N. Jones, 19 July 1984

Swallow 
by D.M. Thomas.
Gollancz, 312 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 0 575 03446 7
Show More
First Among Equals 
by Jeffrey Archer.
Hodder, 446 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 340 35266 3
Show More
Morning Star 
by Simon Raven.
Blond and Briggs, 264 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 9780856341380
Show More
Show More
... from the politicians. This was hardly necessary, since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked like Michael Foot – with Mary Wilson as one of the exceptions. Although I warned the heroine of Mrs Wilson’s Diary that I was a journalist, she favoured me with her political opinions (sound, I thought, if unorthodox) and I ...

Making them think

J.I.M. Stewart, 18 September 1986

G.K. Chesterton 
by Michael Ffinch.
Weidenfeld, 369 pp., £16, June 1986, 0 297 78858 2
Show More
Show More
... on serious questions, it is one’s duty to use silly metaphors on serious questions ... It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it. I can recall this last persuasion as potent with the generation approaching adulthood in Chesterton’s prime. How often was I told over cocoa or mulled wine with devoutly disposed young men, that Savonarola ...

The chair she sat on

J.I.M. Stewart, 19 July 1984

Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920-1969 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hodder, 336 pp., £14.95, June 1984, 0 340 26241 9
Show More
Show More
... that you get excellent teas in Manchester, or conversing freezingly about refrigerators with T.S. Eliot. But even here gaiety broke in and was posthumously triumphant. To a number of her literary friends and admirers she bequeathed looking-glasses. Raisley Moorsom, described in one place by Mrs Spurling as having known Margaret and Ivy ‘almost from the ...

Skinned alive

John Bayley, 25 June 1987

Collected Poems 
by George Barker, edited by Robert Fraser.
Faber, 838 pp., £27.50, May 1987, 0 571 13972 8
Show More
By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept 
by Elizabeth Smart, introduced by Brigid Brophy.
Grafton, 126 pp., £2.50, July 1987, 0 586 02083 7
Show More
Show More
... as if the movement of French or Irish underlaid it, a feeling perceived no doubt by T.S. Eliot when in 1934 he accepted for the Criterion a poem by the 21-year-old George Barker called ‘Daedalus’, a poem which today seems remarkably to combine the flavour of the period with an already complete mastery of this linguistic ‘glide’. Where florid ...

Outside the Academy

Robert Alter, 13 February 1992

Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism 1750-1990 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Macmillan, 392 pp., £40, August 1991, 0 333 43294 0
Show More
A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950. Vol. VII: German, Russian and Eastern European Criticism, 1900-1950 
by René Wellek.
Yale, 458 pp., £26, October 1991, 0 300 05039 9
Show More
Show More
... Thus the prominent Anglo-American critics from 1900 to 1950 – for example, Leavis, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling – produce essentially essayistic work, legislating, setting up evaluative hierarchies, and at their worst, attitudinising. The major Central and East European critics of this period – figures like ...

With Luck

John Lanchester, 2 January 1997

The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage 
edited by R.W. Burchfield.
Oxford, 864 pp., £16.99, November 1996, 0 19 869126 2
Show More
Show More
... statement, opinion, allegation, accusation etc) to be false; to disprove by argument’. When T.S. Eliot (in Murder in the Cathedral) wrote If you make charges, Then in public I will refute them, and when Rebecca West wrote The case against most of them must have been so easily refuted that they could hardly rank at suspects, both writers could be assured that ...

Mauve Monkeys

William Fiennes, 18 September 1997

Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War 
by Philip Hoare.
Duckworth, 250 pp., £16.95, July 1997, 0 7156 2737 6
Show More
Show More
... near Le Havre. In photographs this dark genius has the leanness and meticulous parting of T.S. Eliot, the milky eyes of Enoch Powell, and a monocle that is his signature affectation; the lens of his probity. In March 1916, he became Independent MP for East Hertfordshire, touting protofascist policies: Jewish ghettos and yellow stars; anti-German and ...

Lightning Conductor

Peter Howarth: ‘How to Wash a Heart’, 9 June 2022

How to Wash a Heart 
by Bhanu Kapil.
Pavilion, 52 pp., £9.99, March 2020, 978 1 78962 168 6
Show More
Show More
... in the eyes of UK Immigration. In a happy accident, this made the book eligible for the T.S. Eliot Prize, which it won last year. It also shows how much the migrant artist must always depend on the approval of the ...

Glittering Fiend

Ian Hamilton: John Berryman, 9 December 1999

Berryman's Shakespeare 
edited by John Haffenden.
Farrar, Straus, 396 pp., $35, February 1999, 0 374 11205 3
Show More
John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue 
by Richard Kelly.
Lang, 433 pp., £39, March 1999, 0 8204 3998 3
Show More
Show More
... soon appear in his first book, but he was not happy with them. And neither was anybody else. T.S. Eliot sent them back from the Criterion with a note to the effect that one of them was ‘almost good’ and Berryman was not as dismayed as he might have been when Malcolm Cowley called another batch ‘very skilful exercises, based on the very best ...

Dome Laureate

Dennis O’Driscoll: Simon Armitage, 27 April 2000

Killing Time 
by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 52 pp., £6.99, December 1999, 0 571 20360 4
Show More
Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems 
edited by Simon Armitage.
Faber, 112 pp., £4.99, October 1999, 9780571200016
Show More
Show More
... and apprehension characteristic of parts of Autumn Journal follow on from the fact that, as T.S. Eliot, the poem’s original publisher remarked, ‘the imagery is all imagery of things lived through, and not merely chosen for poetic suggestiveness.’ MacNeice, anxiously ‘Listening to bulletins/From distant, measured voices/Arguing for peace/While the ...

Back to Their Desks

Benjamin Moser: Nescio, 23 May 2013

Amsterdam Stories 
by Nescio, translated by Damion Searls.
NYRB, 161 pp., £7.99, May 2012, 978 1 59017 492 0
Show More
Show More
... an inner necessity. Bavink, a painter, ‘wished he could just give up painting, but that wasn’t so simple either: what’s inside you wants to come out.’ The downfall of these would-be artists is money. As Koekebakker, the narrator of ‘Young Titans’, says: ‘There’s a lot a person needs.’ Attempts to avoid those needs fail, one after ...

Indoor Raincoat

Lavinia Greenlaw: Joy Division, 23 April 2015

So This Is Permanence: Joy Division Lyrics and Notebooks 
by Ian Curtis, edited by Deborah Curtis and Jon Savage.
Faber, 304 pp., £27, October 2014, 978 0 571 30955 9
Show More
Show More
... told her of going to see Apocalypse Now and then coming home to listen to the Doors and read T.S. Eliot. ‘He found the materials that he needed for his escape,’ Savage writes, ‘only to discover – as advised in much of his reading – that escape was impossible.’ Impossible because, as much of that reading matter also concludes, what he needed to ...

I thirst! Water, I beseech thee

Mary Douglas: Sadducees v. Pharisees, 23 June 2005

How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualisation of Ancient Israel 
by William Schniedewind.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £25, May 2005, 0 521 82946 1
Show More
Show More
... to the Corinthians: ‘The letter killeth but the spirit giveth life.’ Two millennia later, T.S. Eliot enters the debate in riposte: ‘Of course, Mr Shaw and Mr Wells are much occupied with religion and Ersatz-Religion. But they are concerned with the spirit not the letter. And the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth ...

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