Search Results

Advanced Search

211 to 225 of 682 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Real Johnny Hall

Penelope Fitzgerald, 3 October 1985

Our Three Selves: A Life of Radclyffe Hall 
by Michael Baker.
Hamish Hamilton, 386 pp., £13.95, June 1985, 0 241 11539 6
Show More
Show More
... was summoned to Bow Street to show cause why it should not be destroyed in the public interest. John Hall (to give her the name she preferred) was not called upon to give evidence, and was silenced, when she tried to interrupt, by the magistrate. In this way the Beaverbrook press started The Well on its career as the best-known lesbian novel in the English ...

Cod on Ice

Andy Beckett: The BBC, 10 July 2003

Panorama: Fifty Years of Pride And Paranoia 
by Richard Lindley.
Politico’s, 404 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 1 902301 80 3
Show More
The Harder Path: The Autobiography 
by John Birt.
Time Warner, 532 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 316 86019 0
Show More
Show More
... that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, regarded Panorama as a microcosm of a BBC that was ‘out of ...

Scalpers Inc.

John Lanchester: ‘Flash Boys’, 5 June 2014

Flash Boys: Cracking the Money Code 
by Michael Lewis.
Allen Lane, 274 pp., £20, March 2014, 978 0 241 00363 3
Show More
Show More
... Early​ in the afternoon of 6 May 2010, the leading stock market index in the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, suddenly started falling. There was no evident external reason for the fall – no piece of news or economic data – but the market, which had been drifting slowly downwards that day, in a matter of minutes dropped by 6 per cent ...

The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism

Jerry Fodor, 22 January 1998

How the Mind Works 
by Steven Pinker.
Penguin, 660 pp., £25, January 1998, 0 7139 9130 5
Show More
Evolution in Mind 
by Henry Plotkin.
Allen Lane, 276 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 7139 9138 0
Show More
Show More
... fact that you can tell, just by looking at it, that any sentence of the syntactic form P and Q (‘John swims and Mary drinks’, as it might be) is true only if P and Q are both true. ‘You can tell just by looking’ means: to see that the entailments hold, you don’t have to know anything about what either P or Q means and you don’t have to know ...

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
... New Penny in Watford, the kids in their mother’s pussy-bow blouses were getting into what Dylan Jones calls ‘a decade of cultural deregulation’. ‘We all wanted to escape into something that wasn’t really there,’ says Marco Pirroni, one-time guitarist with Adam and the Ants. To begin with, it was a southern English thing, but it spread like a rash ...

Sweetly Terminal

Edward Pearce, 5 August 1993

Diaries 
by Alan Clark.
Weidenfeld, 421 pp., £20, June 1993, 0 297 81352 8
Show More
Show More
... smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David (Young) ... I went to Brooks’s, lost £150 and my appetite waned. Returned here and ate a toasted bun, first food since a banana at 1.30. In the tea room I had a chat with Fallon, a nice cool whip. I complained about all this ...

Best Known for His Guzzleosity

Helen Hackett: Shakespeare’s Authors, 11 March 2010

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 367 pp., £20, April 2010, 978 0 571 23576 6
Show More
Show More
... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...

Journeys across Blankness

Jonathan Parry: Mapping the Middle East, 19 October 2017

Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921 
by Daniel Foliard.
Chicago, 336 pp., £45, April 2017, 978 0 226 45133 6
Show More
Show More
... by scholars whose main source was the Bible. (The evangelical adventurer and self-publicist John MacGregor found this a problem on a canoe trip down the Jordan in 1868.) Aspirant surveyors quickly discovered that they needed the co-operation of local tribal leaders, some of whom collaborated in the hope that it would encourage a British force to invade ...

How do I know?

M.F. Burnyeat, 4 November 1993

Testimony: A Philosophical Study 
by C.A.J. Coady.
Oxford, 315 pp., £40, April 1993, 0 19 824786 9
Show More
Show More
... right. Having been told about the crime by people who did see it, they decide that it was indeed Jones, not Smith, who was responsible. Do the jury know that Jones was the villain? According to Plato, they cannot possibly know this – and not just because conditions in a court of law are not ideally suited to the ...

Remembering the taeog

D.A.N. Jones, 30 August 1990

People of the Black Mountains. Vol. II: The Eggs of the Eagle 
by Raymond Williams.
Chatto, 330 pp., £13.99, August 1990, 0 7011 3564 6
Show More
In the Blue Light of African Dreams 
by Paul Watkins.
Heinemann, 282 pp., £13.99, August 1990, 0 09 174307 9
Show More
Friedrich Harris: Shooting the hero 
by Philip Purser.
Quartet, 250 pp., £12.95, May 1990, 0 7043 2759 7
Show More
The Journey Home 
by Dermot Bolger.
Viking, 294 pp., £13.99, June 1990, 0 670 83215 4
Show More
Evenings at Mongini’s 
by Russell Lucas.
Heinemann, 262 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 434 43646 1
Show More
Show More
... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...

Outfoxing Hangman

Thomas Jones: David Mitchell, 11 May 2006

Black Swan Green 
by David Mitchell.
Sceptre, 371 pp., £16.99, May 2006, 0 340 82279 1
Show More
Show More
... or Kafka – the most ‘impressive’ names on his bookshelf are Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin and John Wyndham – but at a village meeting to discuss what to do about a proposed Gypsy campsite, he reflects that ‘the villagers wanted the Gypsies to be gross, so the grossness of what they’re not acts as a stencil for what the villagers are.’ He has ...

Like a boll weevil to a cotton bud

A. Craig Copetas, 18 November 1993

New York Days 
by Willie Morris.
Little, Brown, 400 pp., £19.45, September 1993, 0 316 58421 5
Show More
Show More
... Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and ...

Why do you make me do it?

David Bromwich: Robert Ryan, 18 February 2016

... was marked last year by the publication of a good biography, The Lives of Robert Ryan by J.R. Jones, and a retrospective series at Anthology Film Archives in New York, which screened a few of his films under the title ‘An Actor’s Actor’.* In his last years, Jones says, he got the delayed recognition of a plaque ...

Gove or Galtieri?

Colin Kidd: Popular Conservatism, 5 October 2017

Crown, Church and Constitution: Popular Conservatism in England 1815-67 
by Jörg Neuheiser, translated by Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser.
Berghahn, 320 pp., £78, May 2016, 978 1 78533 140 4
Show More
Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy 
by Daniel Ziblatt.
Cambridge, 450 pp., £26.99, April 2017, 978 0 521 17299 8
Show More
Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830-1914: An Intellectual History 
by Emily Jones.
Oxford, 288 pp., £60, April 2017, 978 0 19 879942 9
Show More
Kind of Blue: A Political Memoir 
by Ken Clarke.
Pan, 525 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 1 5098 3720 5
Show More
Show More
... late 19th-century Unionist renovation of Conservatism is one of the principal subjects of Emily Jones’s surprising and persuasive study of the transformation of Burke, the late 18th-century Anglo-Irish pamphleteer, from a Whig who extolled the importance of party connection into a Tory, indeed into the defining philosopher of High Toryism. Notwithstanding ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Stop-Loss’, 8 May 2008

Stop-Loss 
directed by Kimberly Peirce.
Show More
Show More
... damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told. John Wayne’s film The Green Berets (1968) told another story, but it didn’t tell that one. The cluster of new films about the Iraq War is different in both respects. The war is still going on – indeed has no visible end, in spite of what everyone wants and ...

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