Search Results

Advanced Search

226 to 240 of 452 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Weeding in the Nude

Ange Mlinko: Edna St Vincent Millay, 26 May 2022

Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St Vincent Millay 
edited by Daniel Mark Epstein.
Yale, 390 pp., £28, March, 978 0 300 24568 4
Show More
Show More
... have been ripostes to ‘So, We’ll Go No More A-Roving’ – and she was considered the female Byron. ‘The Ballad of the Harp Weaver’, which won her the Pulitzer, was turned into a song by Johnny Cash.Rhetorically, Millay was a genius: her mastery of attitudes and devices owed a lot to her training as an actress. She knew the value of a theatrical ...

Agog

Rosemary Hill: Love and madness in 18th century London, 7 October 2004

Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the 18th Century 
by John Brewer.
HarperCollins, 340 pp., £20, March 2004, 9780002571340
Show More
Show More
... began to appear in 1848, declared his ambition to make history as compelling as a novel: not since Byron and Scott had a single book been such an instant public success. Macaulay was disgusted by Boswell’s life of Johnson. Biography, with controversial exceptions, entered the dark age of ‘lives of great men’. Hackman and Ray went with it, leaving ...

Dictators on the Loose

Miles Taylor: Modelling Waterloo, 6 January 2005

Wellington’s Smallest Victory: The Duke, the Model Maker and the Secret of Waterloo 
by Peter Hofschröer.
Faber, 324 pp., £14.99, April 2004, 0 571 21768 0
Show More
Show More
... flag there, and later assembling a grisly collection of skulls and other relics at Abbotsford. Byron, Southey and Wordsworth all followed the pilgrim’s trail, and on their return conjured windy verse out of the carnage. Bringing home a piece of the action became all the rage for the curious traveller, of whom there were still some four thousand a year in ...

Nothing could have been odder or more prophetic

Gillian Darley: Ruins, 29 November 2001

In Ruins 
by Christopher Woodward.
Chatto, 280 pp., £12.99, September 2001, 9780701168964
Show More
Show More
... for a Soane architectural dynasty carried forward by generations of sons and grandsons. The young Byron, meanwhile, in his own estimation ‘the last and youngest of a noble line’, saw in the ruinous Newstead Abbey the image of the dissolution of his family fortunes, yet it was an inheritance to which he clung tenaciously for as long as the tide of his ...

A Plumless Pudding

John Sutherland: The Great John Murray Archive Disaster, 18 March 2004

... Another gobbet for the conglomerate soup. The archive, which includes memorabilia such as Byron’s trophy collection of his lovers’ pubic hair, was retained as personal property by the Murray family, who have assured the NLS that any money they receive from the sale (if it goes through) will be applied to a charitable trust. As a publisher, Murray ...

Jane Austen’s Latest

Marilyn Butler, 21 May 1981

Jane Austen’s ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ 
edited by Brian Southam.
Oxford, 150 pp., £7.95, March 1981, 0 19 812637 9
Show More
Show More
... sequence in the story, the abduction and attempted forced marriage of the heroine, Harriet Byron, by the villainous Sir Hargrave Pollexfen: Act the 2d. Scene the 1st. Southam devotes little attention to these false starts, but they must be highly significant. The first idea was to begin Act Two at Colnebrook, the home of Grandison’s sister Lady ...

Gentlemen Travellers

Denis Donoghue, 18 December 1986

Between the Woods and the Water 
by Patrick Leigh Fermor et al.
Murray, 248 pp., £13.95, October 1986, 0 7195 4264 2
Show More
Coasting 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins, 301 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 00 272119 8
Show More
The Grand Tour 
by Hunter Davies.
Hamish Hamilton, 224 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 241 11907 3
Show More
Show More
... experience in one of the styles patented by Graham Greene, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Robert Byron. The scholarly version of these explorations is called anthropology, as in Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clifford Geertz, Margaret Mead, and many American scholars in receipt of sabbatical leave and Guggenheim fellowships. If you have a sufficiently resourceful ...

Diary

Robert Irwin: The Best Thing since Sex, 2 December 1993

... can it match swimming’s distinguished roll-call of writer-enthusiasts: Horace, Sidney, Marlowe, Byron, Arnold, Brooke, Gide, Scott Fitzgerald and, most recently, Charles Sprawson. It is true, of course, that Vladimir Nabokov was a keen roller-skater back in Berlin in the Twenties. More recently, my own novel The Limits of Vision included an extravagantly ...

Odd Union

David Cannadine, 20 October 1994

Mrs Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 415 pp., £18, October 1994, 0 670 84159 5
Show More
Show More
... actress of her day – adored by theatre-goers in London and the provinces; acclaimed by Hazlitt, Byron and Coleridge; cartooned by Gillray, Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy ...

Englishing Ourselves

F.W.J. Hemmings, 18 December 1980

Stendhal 
by Robert Alter.
Allen and Unwin, 285 pp., £8.95, May 1980, 0 04 928042 2
Show More
Show More
... steam-propelled paddle-boat was launched on the waters of a French river. He met and talked to Byron, he knew and corresponded with Balzac, he had an affair with one of Delacroix’s mistresses: in this way, if in no others, he was caught up in that other revolution, European romanticism. But he was for ever on the sidelines, an interested spectator, never ...

Azure Puddles

John Bayley, 21 May 1987

Compton Mackenzie: A Life 
by Andro Linklater.
Chatto, 384 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 7011 2583 7
Show More
Show More
... competition with the activities of his dynamic father. On Capri he was to see himself as Byron, D.H. Lawrence as Shelley and Francis Brett Young as a more retiring kind of Keats. And Lawrence was fascinated by him, found him sympathetic and good company, and made him the model in his story called ‘The man who loved islands’. The story could just ...

Out of Germany

E.S. Shaffer, 2 October 1980

The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £14.50, April 1980, 0 521 22560 4
Show More
Criticism in the Wilderness. The Study of Literature Today 
by Geoffrey Hartman.
Yale, 314 pp., £11.40, October 1980, 0 300 02085 6
Show More
Show More
... many continuators and imitators of Faust I in Germany, the best, Grill-parzer (highly praised by Byron), returned to a tragic interpretation of the traditional matter. There is a question of method here: a history of critical reception must not simply adopt a contemptuous view of early critics from its supposed vantage-point in the unexamined present, but ...

Possibility throbs

Richard Altick, 23 July 1987

Palais-Royal 
by Richard Sennett.
Faber, 274 pp., £10.95, May 1987, 0 571 14718 6
Show More
Show More
... revolutionary democracy, and he suffered agonies as he sought to find a role model – Pascal or Byron? In coming, as he did, to embrace agnosticism, he slowly developed a way of life if not utter peace of soul. In his later years, known to the French as ‘the English Voltaire’, he edited the influential quarterly, the Free Thinker. The narrative of these ...

Creepy

Gerald Howard, 18 July 1996

Secret Life 
by Michael Ryan.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 7475 2545 5
Show More
Show More
... movement. Over-eaters, over-shoppers, over-workers – everyone has their confessional niche. Byron famously remarked that ‘Augustine in his fine Confessions makes the reader envy his transgressions’; no such envy is likely to arise from reading Ryan’s accounts of his joyless couplings. He reached his lowest point when he found himself driving ...

That’s Liquor!

Nick James, 7 March 1996

Leaving Las Vegas 
directed by Mike Figgis.
Show More
Show More
... places where a bottle can be concealed. The angel may tidy up and offer support, as Kathleen Byron does to David Farrar in The Small Back Room, telling him to ‘have a drink’ from the unopened bottle of Scotch which was 20-feet tall and toppling towards him just before she came in. More often though, she will have given up and drifted away, leaving ...

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