Search Results

Advanced Search

226 to 240 of 254 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Writing Absurdity

Adam Shatz: Chester Himes, 26 April 2018

Chester B. Himes: A Biography 
by Lawrence P. Jackson.
Norton, 606 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 393 06389 9
Show More
Show More
... him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing this side of the Atlantic.’ Jackson, whose previous book, The Indignant Generation, was a formidable history of black ...

A Man with My Trouble

Colm Tóibín: Henry James leaves home, 3 January 2008

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume I 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 391 pp., £57, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2584 8
Show More
The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume II 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 524 pp., £60, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2607 4
Show More
Show More
... slim volumes of these to appear, both of which he came to dislike, he was hesitant thereafter to grant permission for any more collections. Even as late as 1955, when Edel edited a Selected Letters, his work was still overseen by the family. ‘I remember removing a letter dealing with Guy Domville from the Selected Letters,’ Edel wrote, ‘because Billy ...

From a Novel in Progress

James Wood, 9 May 2002

... and might I presume on the leniency and compassion (this word underlined) of the assessors to grant me another six months to get my taxes in order? This was read out in a flat, bored voice so that, if one closed one’s eyes, one would swear that the reader – a terribly thin man – was simultaneously doing something else. I kept my eyes down, and ...

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work 
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 241 94549 0
Show More
Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory 
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September, 978 1 80429 011 8
Show More
Show More
... then called, also entitled me to three years of Scottish Education Department postgraduate student grant. Sussex, I read, offered a one-year taught MA in philosophy, which included Marx and Hegel: the ideal conversion course. I applied, I was accepted, I had funding, off I went.The University of Sussex, established in 1961, was the first of Britain’s ...

Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0
Show More
‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
National Portrait GalleryShow More
Show More
... Clive Bell went to the Paris exhibitions, there were stories by David Garnett, features on Duncan Grant, and Woolf wrote five pieces, including one about Sir Walter Raleigh. Vogue still owed something to the society magazine that was the earliest incarnation of the American edition, and the first frontispiece went to Eileen Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of ...

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
... spite of her infidelities. She celebrates my body down to the waist. That is all I allow myself to grant. The rest belongs to Georges and no one else in the world can touch it. The rest would make the sin too big; and anyway that rest is so accustomed to Georges that it throbs for no one but him. From one point of view, droll enough. But from the sapphist ...

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
... retold (they have been best explained before in instructional texts, like Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson’s wonderful but technical The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation), and even hard-to-follow business dealings are presented with something approaching the same intensity. (I found myself in a state of acute anxiety at several points ...

Most Himself

Matthew Reynolds: Dryden, 19 July 2007

The Poems of John Dryden: Vol. V 1697-1700 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 707 pp., £113.99, July 2005, 0 582 49214 9
Show More
Dryden: Selected Poems 
edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins.
Longman, 856 pp., £19.99, February 2007, 978 1 4058 3545 9
Show More
Show More
... to please his patrons and audiences has made his work less pleasing in the longer term. One can grant that all published writing, like all public life, requires some accommodation to its readership, and so some liaison with hypocrisy, and yet still be troubled by lines such as these, about Charles II: Music herself is lost, in vain she brings Her choicest ...

Don’t break that fiddle

Tobias Gregory: Eclectic Imitators, 19 November 2020

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 470 pp., £36.99, May 2019, 978 0 19 883808 1
Show More
How the Classics Made Shakespeare 
by Jonathan Bate.
Princeton, 361 pp., £15.99, October 2020, 978 0 691 21014 8
Show More
Show More
... were well known images of Venus in antiquity and in Renaissance Europe; Shakespeare, adapting Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, describes Cleopatra as ‘O’erpicturing that Venus where we see/The fancy out-work nature’. The classical genre terms ‘tragedy’, ‘comedy’ and ‘pastoral’ were employed and analysed in the ...

The Monster in the Milk Bowl

Richard Poirier, 3 October 1996

Pierre, or The Ambiguities 
by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £15.99, May 1996, 0 06 118009 2
Show More
Show More
... edition of The Writings of Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle. Now, in 1996, this same Hershel Parker, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, has constructed an alternative version meant to approximate the originally completed novel Melville delivered to Harpers. In the absence of any ...

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
... a mirror on the opposite wall. There is a tendency to discuss these pictures as documentary. Thomas Kennedy writes in the Tate catalogue that Sickert is offering ‘realistic representations of people who visited music halls … His works show how people unconsciously engage with the social performative act of being part of an audience.’ But though the ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
Show More
The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
Show More
Show More
... the following textual emendation:From Zeno to Spinoza, from the Gnostics to Leibniz, from Thomas Hobbes to Lenin and Freud, the battle-cry has been essentially the same; the object of knowledge and the methods of discovery have often been violently opposed, but that reality is knowable, and that knowledge and only knowledge liberates, and absolute ...

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 ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...

How does he come to be mine?

Tim Parks: Dickens’s Children, 8 August 2013

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Farrar, Straus, 239 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 0 374 29880 7
Show More
Show More
... admission to the home, where they were interviewed by Dickens personally, who decided whether to grant them entry or not. He was involved in society in every possible way, by far the most popular author in the country. He belonged. No one could exclude him, though there was always the possibility that he might isolate himself, as someone now too worthy 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