Search Results

Advanced Search

241 to 255 of 405 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Out of Babel

Michael Hofmann: Thomas Bernhard Traduced, 14 December 2017

Collected Poems 
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by James Reidel.
Chicago, 459 pp., £25, June 2017, 978 0 85742 426 6
Show More
Show More
... have bitten more sharply the hand that clapped.’ But, still staggering on, the effort continues. James Reidel, who in 2006 published parallel text translations of Bernhard’s second and third books of poems, In Hora Mortis and Under the Iron of the Moon, has come back ten years later with an English-only Collected Poems. Most readers, even quite possibly ...

Dismantling the class war

Paul Addison, 25 July 1991

The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol I.: Regions and Communities 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 608 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25788 3
Show More
The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950. Vol II.: People and Their Environment 
edited by F.M.L. Thompson.
Cambridge, 392 pp., June 1990, 0 521 25789 1
Show More
The Temper of the Times: British Society since World War Two 
by Bill Williamson.
Blackwell, 308 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 631 15919 3
Show More
Show More
... the regular churchgoing of the middle classes was more than a matter of outward convention. As James Obelkevich observes in the chapter on religion, ‘the deep and genuine religious commitment evident in this and other classes in Victorian society should not be underestimated.’ Michael Thompson’s chapter, at the beginning of Volume One, is a tour de ...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

Come aboard and sail away 
by John Fuller.
Salamander, 48 pp., £6, October 1983, 0 907540 37 6
Show More
Children in Exile 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 24 pp., £5, October 1983, 0 907540 39 2
Show More
‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’: Poems 1968-1983 
by James Fenton.
Penguin, 110 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 14 006812 0
Show More
Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology 
edited by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85635 469 4
Show More
Nights in the Iron Hotel 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 48 pp., £4, November 1983, 0 571 13116 6
Show More
The Irish Lights 
by Charles Johnston and Kyril Fitzlyon.
Bodley Head, 77 pp., £4.50, September 1983, 0 370 30557 4
Show More
Fifteen to Infinity 
by Ruth Fainlight.
Hutchinson, 62 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 09 152471 7
Show More
Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature 
edited by George Dekker.
Carcanet, 153 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 9780856354663
Show More
Show More
... friends in a charmed circle. This even applies in some degree to so deliberately moving a poem as James Fenton’s ‘Children in Exile’, describing the arrival in Italy of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. I hear a child moan in the next room and I see    The nightmare spread like rain across his face And his limbs twitch in some vestigial combat ...

Styling

John Lanchester, 21 October 1993

United States 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 1298 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 233 98832 7
Show More
What Henry James Knew, and Other Essays on Writers 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Cape, 363 pp., £12.99, June 1993, 0 224 03329 8
Show More
Sentimental Journeys 
by Joan Didion.
HarperCollins, 319 pp., £15, January 1993, 0 00 255146 2
Show More
Show More
... often fail: the more complete and compelling the circumstantial detail of, say, Ellman’s Joyce or Painter’s Proust or Edel’s James, the less likely it seems that the man could have written the books; the better we come to know the artist, the greater the seeming gap between him and the work. But in Ozick’s ...

With the wind in our shrouds

Mary Beard, 26 July 1990

The Making of ‘The Golden Bough’: The Origin and Growth of an Argument 
by Robert Fraser.
Macmillan, 240 pp., £35, July 1990, 0 333 49631 0
Show More
Show More
... men breathe.’ The cultural revolutionary celebrated here (unlikely as it must now seem) is Sir James Frazer, extravagantly written up over half a page in the News Chronicle of 27 January 1937. The article – under the title ‘He discovered why you believe what you do’ – certainly does not stint its praises of the grand old man, then in his ...

Waldorf’s Birthday Present

Gabriele Annan: The Lovely Langhornes, 7 January 1999

The Langhorne Sisters 
by James Fox.
Granta, 612 pp., £20, November 1998, 1 86207 071 7
Show More
Show More
... from coast to coast, she never got divorced and never gave any trouble, so she doesn’t come into James Fox’s story much; and neither does the eldest Langhorne sister Lizzie. Lizzie just got on the others’ nerves and was poor. There were also three brothers, but they don’t come into the story at all. They drank a lot, as did many Southern gentlemen ...

Fiction and E.M. Forster

Frank Kermode: At the Cost of Life, 10 May 2007

... of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks ...

Dark Tom

Christopher Ricks, 1 December 1983

Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley 1933-1980 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 323 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 436 28852 4
Show More
Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Fontana, 274 pp., £2.50, October 1983, 0 00 636644 9
Show More
Show More
... with tyranny which democracy may be moved to make, ‘Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco, 1959’, James Wright flashlit the dark disingenuousness of Fascism: Franco stands in a shining circle of police. His arms open in welcome. He promises all dark things Will be hunted down. The Fascist leader proceeds with a travesty of ordered enlightened equability; he ...

Hyacinth Boy

Mark Ford: T.S. Eliot, 21 September 2006

T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet 
by James E. Miller.
Pennsylvania State, 468 pp., £29.95, August 2005, 0 271 02681 2
Show More
The Annotated ‘Waste Land’ with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose 
by T.S. Eliot, edited by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 270 pp., $35, April 2005, 0 300 09743 3
Show More
Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ 
by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 203 pp., £22.50, May 2005, 0 300 10707 2
Show More
Show More
... Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das Meer’ (‘Desolate and empty the sea’). James Miller was the first critic inspired by Peter’s speculations and the appearance of the drafts to attempt a thorough outing of Eliot. His T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (1977) offered ‘new interpretations’ of much of Eliot’s early work, and found ...

Raining

Donald Davie, 5 May 1983

Later Poems 
by R.S. Thomas.
Macmillan, 224 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 333 34560 6
Show More
Thomas Hardy Annual, No 1 
edited by Norman Page.
Macmillan, 205 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 333 32022 0
Show More
Tess of the d’Urbervilles 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell.
Oxford, 636 pp., £50, March 1983, 0 19 812495 3
Show More
Hardy’s Love Poems 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Carl Weber.
Macmillan, 253 pp., £3.95, February 1983, 0 333 34798 6
Show More
The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy. Vol. I: Wessex Poems, Poems of the Past and the Present, Time’s Laughingstocks 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 403 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 0 19 812708 1
Show More
Show More
... the Hardy industry’: no sooner had they decided to invest in the newly enhanced commodity (the Joyce industry and the Pound industry being overmanned, and working stony and difficult terrains in any case) than there appeared in 1978 The Older Hardy, the second volume of Robert Gittings’s biography, which had the effect of vindicating, exhaustively and ...

Fools

P.N. Furbank, 15 October 1981

Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics 
by Robert Green.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £16.50, July 1981, 9780521236102
Show More
Show More
... the point here. It was a very rich tradition, this ‘Frenchness’, within which Ford and Henry James and Conrad worked. And one strand of it came from Balzac. I refer to the theme of the Lamb thrown to the Wolves: the spectacle, implacably presented by the novelist, of innocence cast to its devourers amid the total misunderstanding of motives and with no ...

Diary

Zachary Leader: Oscar Talk at the Huntington, 16 April 1998

... the only 20th-century writer represented here: the Library has significant Modernist holdings (Joyce, Yeats, Wallace Stevens – none of whom Amis had much time for), as well as extensive collections of Stevenson and Jack London, the latter represented by 131,000 items. It has also purchased the archive of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis’s ...

Into Thin Air

Marina Warner: Science at the Séances, 3 October 2002

The Invention of Telepathy 
by Roger Luckhurst.
Oxford, 334 pp., £35, June 2002, 0 19 924962 8
Show More
Show More
... had on ideas of the self in psychology and literature. Pamela Thurschwell’s fine study of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and George du Maurier1 showed how profoundly the developments in ‘magical thinking’ reverberated in fiction and its portrayal of character and perception; and Malcolm Gaskill recently tackled, with amused brio, the life and times of the ...

MacDiarmid and his Maker

Robert Crawford, 10 November 1988

MacDiarmid 
by Alan Bold.
Murray, 482 pp., £17.95, September 1988, 0 7195 4585 4
Show More
A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle 
by Hugh MacDiarmid, edited by Kenneth Buthlay.
Scottish Academic Press, 203 pp., £12.50, February 1988, 0 7073 0425 3
Show More
The Hugh MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters 
edited by Catherine Kerrigan.
Aberdeen University Press, 156 pp., £24.90, August 1988, 0 08 036409 8
Show More
Hugh MacDiarmid and the Russian 
by Peter McCarey.
Scottish Academic Press, 225 pp., £12.50, March 1988, 0 7073 0526 8
Show More
Show More
... early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could devour, this proto-MacDiarmid emerges as something ...

The Story of Joe

Craig Raine, 4 December 1986

The Orton Diaries 
edited by John Lahr.
Methuen, 307 pp., £12.50, November 1986, 0 413 49660 0
Show More
Show More
... And yet. The diaries begin with his mother’s funeral in 1966. Leonie Orton, Joe’s sister, told James Fox of the Sunday Times: He nearly had mother out of her coffin ... He was picking her head up. ‘What’s all this brown stuff?’; ‘try and get her rings off.’ I said: ‘I don’t want to.’ He said: ‘I do.’ He wanted to see her feet, he was ...

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