Search Results

Advanced Search

226 to 240 of 518 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

An Address to the Nation

Clive James, 17 December 1981

... attempts he met defeat. Clearly it is the SDP connection Which has supplied the upsurge of white heat That melts the Tory vote to a minority And Labour’s to abject inferiority. This Pitt falls far short of so grand a name. Long in the beard, he’s less so in the legs. He lacks the stature for his sudden fame. It’s plain that of the Pitts he is the ...

About as Useful as a String Condom

Glen Newey: Bum Decade for the Royals, 23 January 2003

... She bared all about self-harm and her frequent calls, during her bulimic phase, on the great white telephone. She fondled children and animals, dabbled in New Age pursuits, kibitzed in operating theatres and had been stiffed on a pedalo by the thick-set offspring of a Levantine grocer. In op-ed fable she presented the Windsor family’s lone human ...

A Grand and Disastrous Deceit

Philippe Sands: The Chilcot Report, 28 July 2016

The Report of the Iraq Inquiry 
by John Chilcot.
HMSO, 12 vols, 6275 pp., £767, 1 4741 3331 2
Show More
Show More
... UK to a policy of regime change. In April 2002, at a meeting at George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas, Tony Blair ‘sought a partnership’ with Bush and argued for ‘an ultimatum calling on Iraq to permit the return of weapon inspectors or face the consequences’. In July Blair told the president: ‘I will be with you, whatever.’ In September he and the ...

Smoking for England

Paul Foot, 5 July 1984

Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco 
by Peter Taylor.
Bodley Head, 384 pp., £9.95, March 1984, 0 370 30513 2
Show More
Show More
... the Association of Business Sponsorship of the Arts, which was founded in 1976 by, among others, Tony Garrett, chairman of Imperial Tobacco. For all this hectic lobbying and slush, tobacco has lost a little of its pulling power in Britain and America since its peak in 1973. It has responded with relish by concentrating more and more on selling its poison in ...

Demob

Robert Morley, 7 July 1983

Downing Street in Perspective 
by Marcia Falkender.
Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 297 78107 3
Show More
Show More
... of character have been influenced by Lady Falkender’s guide and mentor. In seeking to assess Tony Benn’s potential as a future Labour prime minister, she writes that his fantasy concerns the rule of the ordinary man but an ordinary man transformed into a superhuman of sparkling intelligence, total integrity and overflowing love and kindness. How that ...

Seeing double

Patrick Hughes, 7 May 1987

The Arcimboldo Effect 
by Pontus Hulten.
Thames and Hudson, 402 pp., £32, May 1987, 0 500 27471 1
Show More
Show More
... Masturbator. Dali showed us a postcard of one of the colonies in Africa. Natives in front of a big white tent, leaning, sitting, lying, etc. It was a horizontal photo. When he turned it vertically what we saw was the large head of a woman – the tent was her chin, the figures her features. The double image. This is how Alfred and I got the idea of the double ...

Alan Coren

Alan Brien, 4 December 1980

The Best of Alan Coren 
Robson, 416 pp., £7.50, October 1980, 0 86051 121 9Show More
Tissues for Men 
by Alan Coren.
Robson, 160 pp., £4.95, September 1980, 0 86051 116 2
Show More
Show More
... word. ‘Feeling profound or vehement’ is reserved for those who wish to change society – for Tony Benn, the ‘Race Relations Industry’, the sexologist, the prison reformer, the militant trade-unionist. Whatever is, is right, unless it’s Left. Humour also is often wary, and frequently contemptuous, of all tender emotions. The quickest way into ...

Think again, wimp

John Sutherland: Virgin Porn, 16 April 1998

Sugar and Spice: A Black Lace Short Story Collection 
edited by Kerri Sharp.
Black Lace, 292 pp., £7.99, October 1997, 0 352 33227 1
Show More
Ménage 
by Emma Holly.
Black Lace, 261 pp., £5.99, January 1998, 9780352332318
Show More
Show More
... the rightness of what you are saying or selling. Mr Wainwright is correct; it does resemble one of Tony Blair’s techniques: the Prime Minister’s wide-eyed defence of his Party in the Ecclestone business, for instance. By interposing his own reassuring image between the band and the public, Branson was able to take on the Sex Pistols (after they had been ...

Diary

Alan Strathern: A report from Sri Lanka, 1 November 2007

... the UK was as usual being criticised for being soft on terror. It had suspended some aid, and Tony Blair wrote to the president expressing anxiety that the government was escalating hostilities in an unwinnable war and failing to protect human rights. (I hope he had to wrestle with the irony for at least a second or two before he signed this letter.) The ...

Hindsight Tickling

Christopher Tayler: Disappointing sequels, 21 October 2004

The Closed Circle 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 433 pp., £17.99, September 2004, 0 670 89254 8
Show More
Show More
... object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no particular ...

Short Cuts

Tom Hickman: Outside Appointments, 15 August 2024

... adviser David Young as minister without portfolio in 1984, but the Labour administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown made much more use of the practice of outside appointments, with Brown appointing Peter Mandelson in 2008 as secretary of state for business and then in 2009 as ‘first secretary of state’, a title that was chosen instead of deputy ...

My Kind of Psychopath

Michael Wood, 20 July 1995

Pulp Fiction 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 198 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 571 17546 5
Show More
Reservoir Dogs 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 113 pp., £7.99, November 1994, 0 571 17362 4
Show More
True Romance 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 134 pp., £7.99, January 1995, 0 571 17593 7
Show More
Natural Born Killers 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 175 pp., £7.99, July 1995, 0 571 17617 8
Show More
Show More
... unable to spot the cop in their midst. True Romance, Tarantino’s first script, directed by Tony Scott and released in 1993, has a big drug deal that ends in a massacre because too many people show up at the party. There is a marvellous three-way stand-off here – drug-buyer’s bodyguards against cops against Mafia – which is repeated in Reservoir ...
England’s dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock 
by Jon Savage.
Faber, 602 pp., £17.50, October 1991, 0 571 13975 2
Show More
Show More
... Punk rockers looked ugly, partly because, being ill-favoured, gangly and for the most part poor-white geeks, they were to the manner born, and partly because they wanted to. They sounded ugly, partly because not many could play their instruments very well, partly because they were out of their heads most of the time, but mostly because they wanted to. The ...

Working the Dark Side

David Bromwich: On the Uses of Torture, 8 January 2015

... chiefly in the cause of social control and illegal violence. In effecting this rupture of morale, Tony Blair had an importance second only to Cheney. After 2001, Blair’s words carried a weight with respectable opinion in the US unrivalled by any American politician. His demeanour lent to the campaign for war a presumption of humility that Cheney could never ...

Death in Plain Sight

Marina Warner: Emily Davison, Modern Martyr, 4 July 2013

... movement visualised its anger, the demands and the diversity of its members. The purple, green and white of the suffragette colours formed a new revolutionary tricolour, and the WSPU and the suffragettes, the union’s militant element, patterned themselves on the radical Enlightenment. Led by the artist Jacques-Louis David, the Jacobins adapted Catholic ...

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