Search Results

Advanced Search

226 to 240 of 338 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Like What Our Peasants Still Are

Landeg White: Afrocentrism, 13 May 1999

Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes 
by Stephen Howe.
Verso, 337 pp., £22, June 1998, 1 85984 873 7
Show More
Show More
... and the English Nonconformist radicals of the 17th and 18th centuries described by Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson. He pauses, for example, over the Black Panther leader David Hilliard’s painful account of his attempts to understand Frantz Fanon (‘I’m lost. I have the dictionary in one hand, the book in the other, and I can’t get past the first ...

Wizard Contrivances

Jon Day: Will Self, 27 September 2012

Umbrella 
by Will Self.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 1 4088 2014 8
Show More
Show More
... lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill Calypso warms the cold Friern Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath. I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man, oh I’m an ape man … The lawns and verges are soft with dew, his arms and his legs are stiff ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Rape-Rape, 5 November 2009

... pursued. Then I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It ...

Deal of the Century

David Thomson: As Ovitz Tells It, 7 March 2019

Who Is Michael Ovitz? 
by Michael Ovitz.
W.H. Allen, 372 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 0 7535 5336 7
Show More
Show More
... loved Encino until I knew better, and then I hated it. We were on the wrong side of the hill from all the action.’ The Ovitzes reached Encino in 1951, the same year A Place in the Sun was released. Already, an urge was building in Mike to be the sun in the place. He seemed a mild guy, with that stilted smile, but he was ready for confrontation and ...

I want to be queen

Michael Wood: Rimbaud’s High Jinks, 19 January 2023

The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Polizzotti.
NYRB, 306 pp., £16.99, July 2022, 978 1 68137 650 9
Show More
Show More
... a botanical cluster some of us have never heard of? Or why would a poet dig up the echo? Geoffrey Hill writes of a tendency to ‘crave ambiguity in plain speaking/as I do’ (in ‘In Memoriam: Ernst Barlach’), but Rimbaud seems to be mocking the poverty of his mother tongue, its miserly repetition of similar sounds for such different purposes.But then of ...

Holy Boldness

Tom Paulin: John Bunyan, 16 December 2004

Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent 
by Richard Greaves.
Stanford, 693 pp., £57.50, August 2002, 0 8047 4530 7
Show More
Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan 
by Michael Davies.
Oxford, 393 pp., £65, July 2002, 0 19 924240 2
Show More
The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ 
by Isabel Hofmeyr.
Princeton, 320 pp., £41.95, January 2004, 0 691 11655 5
Show More
Show More
... one day, he would preach the next. Towards the end of his sentence, the Bedfordshire justices sent Paul Cobb, a clerk of the peace, to obtain Bunyan’s submission. Had Bunyan been willing to sue for pardon and to admit that he had wrongfully convened the meeting at Lower Samsell, he would have been freed, but he refused. Bunyan told Cobb he was willing to ...

A Pound Here, a Pound There

David Runciman, 21 August 2014

... Three’ bookmaking firms that dominated the market (the other two were Ladbrokes and William Hill). I was a cashier, which meant I took in the bets, made a record of them (using a fairly rudimentary photocopying system) and paid out to the lucky winners. Behind me and a couple of other cashiers sat the manager, a kindly, depressive middle-aged man who ...

Thatcher’s Artists

Peter Wollen, 30 October 1997

Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 
by Norman Rosenthal.
Thames and Hudson, 222 pp., £29.95, September 1997, 0 500 23752 2
Show More
Show More
... does in LA; the Chapman brothers’ polymorphous perverse tableaux of mannequins are much like Paul MacCarthy’s; Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose make Gillian Wearing’s videos look rather sweet and innocent; LA ‘pathetic art’ is alive and feebly kicking in London; Hadrian Pigott’s instrument case inevitably calls to mind Michele Rollman’s ...

Anna of All the Russias

John Bayley, 24 January 1991

Selected Poems 
by Anna Akhmatova, selected and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.
Harvill, 173 pp., £5.95, November 1989, 0 00 271041 2
Show More
The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova 
translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited by Roberta Reeder.
Zephyr, 1635 pp., £85, October 1990, 0 939010 13 5
Show More
The Garden: New and Selected Poetry and Prose 
by Bella Akhmadulina.
Boyars, 171 pp., £9.95, January 1991, 0 7145 2924 9
Show More
Show More
... salt. Behind the vats of judgment brewing   Thundered, and thick the brimstone snowed; He to the hill of his undoing   Pursued his road. No less of a little masterpiece in its way than Akhmatova’s poem, this was never published by Housman but came out posthumously in More Poems. Their treatment of the same topic demonstrates the complete openness of ...

Home Stretch

John Sutherland: David Storey, 17 September 1998

A Serious Man 
by David Storey.
Cape, 359 pp., £16.99, June 1998, 9780224051583
Show More
Saville 
by David Storey.
Vintage, 555 pp., £6.99, June 1998, 0 09 927408 6
Show More
Show More
... the memorable Storeyism, ‘the shell had cracked.’ Colin Saville makes his break, turning like Paul Morel towards the light of the city on the hill. He’s done with school-mastering. ‘You haven’t any lodgings or anything,’ his lachrymose mother tells him as he prepares to catch the train to London. ‘I don’t ...

How to Kowtow

D.J. Enright: The thoughts of China, 29 July 1999

The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds 
by Jonathan Spence.
Penguin, 279 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7139 9313 8
Show More
Show More
... he wrote to his wife. So much for that famous peaceableness.) More serious exponents were Paul Claudel, poet and diplomat (Shanghai, he wrote in 1896, was ‘an industrious honeycomb communicating in all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill’), and Victor Segalen, poet, novelist and physician, who travelled in ...

Sinking Giggling into the Sea

Jonathan Coe, 18 July 2013

The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson 
edited by Harry Mount.
Bloomsbury, 149 pp., £9.99, June 2013, 978 1 4081 8352 6
Show More
Show More
... he and Guppy discussed during that conversation, including their military heroes. And suddenly, Paul Merton interjects with the line: ‘Hence Major Goof that you mentioned just now.’It’s a lovely joke, which gets a terrific laugh and a round of applause. But its effect on the exchange is noticeable. An uncomfortable situation is suddenly ...

This is America, man

Michael Wood: ‘Treme’ and ‘The Wire’, 27 May 2010

The Wire 
created by David Simon.
HBO/2002-2008
Show More
Treme 
created by Eric Overmyer and David Simon.
HBO/April
Show More
Show More
... going to ring a bit hollow to anyone who likes these other series, glossy as they are, or thinks Hill Street Blues and LA Law are among the best things American television has ever done. I don’t really doubt the authenticity of The Wire, its proliferation of unpulled punches, but it isn’t good because it’s authentic, it looks authentic because it’s ...

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

... The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have seemed more dubious. With ...

A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

... jokes about Clinton are always the same joke. ‘When he comes to a fork in the road,’ writes Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them too. And so forth. (I myself have contributed a one-liner: ‘Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? Because he wanted to get to the middle.’) In ...

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