Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 42 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Playboys of the GPO

Colm Tóibín, 18 April 1996

Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation 
by Declan Kiberd.
Cape, 719 pp., £20, November 1995, 0 224 04197 5
Show More
Show More
... play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and coloniser will play, the masks ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
Show More
Show More
... Stephen noted), but with the help of his indefatigable assistant and eventual successor, Sidney Lee, the ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no ...

Run to the hills

James Meek: Rainspotting, 22 May 2003

Rain 
by Brian Cathcart.
Granta, 100 pp., £5.99, September 2002, 1 86207 534 4
Show More
Show More
... but everyone in Britain gets a corporate-box view of the weather. ‘In the past few years,’ Brian Cathcart writes on page two, ‘I have watched a lot of rain through my big window.’ As beginnings of British books about Britain go, this is unpromising. The only more daunting marker of intent would be: ‘In the past few years, I have watched a lot of ...

End of the Century

John Sutherland, 13 October 1988

Worlds Apart 
by David Holbrook.
Hale, 205 pp., £10.95, September 1988, 9780709033639
Show More
Story of My Life 
by Jay McInerney.
Bloomsbury, 188 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 7475 0180 7
Show More
Forgotten Life 
by Brian Aldiss.
Gollancz, 284 pp., £11.95, September 1988, 0 575 04369 5
Show More
Incline Our hearts 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 241 12256 2
Show More
Show More
... story in the first person. It has the contours of a moral tract. While ‘busting her ass’ at Lee Strasberg’s studio, Alison gets by on a handsome (but inadequate for the lifestyle) monthly allowance of $1500 from her father, who lives in the Virgin Islands with his new bimbo Tanya, who’s a year younger than his daughter. All her parents ever gave her ...

Mysteries of Kings Cross

Iain Sinclair, 5 October 1995

Vale Royal 
by Aidan Dun.
Goldmark, 130 pp., £22.50, July 1995
Show More
Show More
... through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an open-ended project. The names of the poets were the ...

Woman/Manly

Kristin Dombek: Kim Gordon, 19 March 2015

Girl in a Band 
by Kim Gordon.
Faber, 288 pp., £14.99, February 2015, 978 0 571 31383 9
Show More
Show More
... I’d learned about growing up. And there was Kim Gordon, lined up between Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, in the middle of the huge stage, not a token girl bass player, not a riot grrrl in an angry all-girl band, but a musician among musicians, standing next to her husband, to all appearances equal, taking turns. It meant something, the way she was, and ...

Dixie Peach Pomade

Alex Abramovich: In the Room with Robert Johnson, 6 October 2022

Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson 
by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.
Hachette Go, 224 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 306 84526 0
Show More
Show More
... They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified blues in Detroit and Chicago, were repackaged and resold in the 1960s as the ‘Real Folk Blues’.When Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Censorship in Ireland, 21 March 2013

... but also the class of reader which may reasonably be expected to read each book. So, as the writer Lee Dunne would point out fifty years later, ‘A book that is clean at five pounds is dirty at fifty pence.’ Members of the Catholic Truth Society, established to assist the uneducated by disseminating ‘good cheap Catholic literature’, sought out and ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Summer in Donegal, 16 September 1999

... island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone cabin, how old I don’t know, but it would have been inhabited by Gaelic speakers who cut hay on the two hidden meadows further up the hill, or grew potatoes or oats on them. It’s a hot, sunny July ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
Show More
In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
Show More
Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
Show More
The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
Show More
Show More
... Hong Kong, however, and produced the nearest it has had to a tribune of the people: Martin Lee, now 59, the son of a Kuomintang general who fled to Hong Kong, rather than Taiwan, in 1949. The younger Lee, trained in Lincoln’s Inn, became a leader of the Hong Kong Bar, a member of the Legislative Council, and of the ...

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges 
by Stuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4
Show More
Show More
... fact, since we’ve long been able to draw on two hefty volumes of screenplays superbly edited by Brian Henderson. What I have described as idiosyncrasies, Klawans would probably regard as complications intended to reinvigorate well-worn comic formulae. He doesn’t by any means underestimate the strength of the contempt for ‘simple-minded ...

Strangers

John Lanchester, 11 July 1991

Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon 
edited by Stephen Egger.
Praeger, 250 pp., £33.50, October 1990, 0 275 92986 8
Show More
Serial Killers 
by Joel Norris.
Arrow, 333 pp., £4.99, July 1990, 0 09 971750 6
Show More
Life after Life 
by Tony Parker.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.50, May 1991, 0 330 31528 5
Show More
American Psycho 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 399 pp., £6.99, April 1991, 0 330 31992 2
Show More
Dirty Weekend 
by Helen Zahavi.
Macmillan, 185 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 333 54723 3
Show More
Silence of the Lambs 
by Thomas Harris.
Mandarin, 366 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 0 7493 0942 3
Show More
Show More
... The horrifying nature of these statistics is compounded by the case-histories they conceal. Henry Lee Lucas, subject of the film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, is currently on death row in Texas. He claims to have murdered 360 people across a range of states in the American South; the Police claim to have verified 160 of these killings: both claims have ...

Because We Could

David Simpson: Soldiers and Torture, 18 November 2010

None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture 
by Joshua Phillips.
Verso, 237 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 1 84467 599 9
Show More
Show More
... But they were greeted with almost unanimous critical disapproval and were box-office failures. Brian de Palma’s Redacted – in my view one of the two masterpieces among the four, along with Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah – failed even to cover its modest production budget. There was no lack of star appeal in the films: Tom Cruise, Meryl ...

The Ribs of Rosinante

Richard Gott, 21 August 1997

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Bantam, 814 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 593 03403 1
Show More
Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara 
by Jorge Castañeda, translated by Marina Castañeda.
Bloomsbury, 480 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 7475 3334 2
Show More
Show More
... enchantment that came completely naturally,’ Julia Costenla, an Argentine journalist told Jon Lee Anderson when he was researching his biography of Guevara. ‘If he entered a room, everything began revolving around him.’That night he found a seat in a corner of the embassy gardens and everyone gathered round. I haven’t much memory of what was ...

The Party and the Army

Ronan Bennett, 21 March 1996

... of Sinn Fein councillor Bobby Lavery – within twelve months they had also killed his son; Brian Nelson, a British military intelligence agent, described in court by a Colonel J as a ‘hero’, conspired to murder, among others, Belfast city councillor Alex Maskey – that Brian Nelson escaped multiple life ...

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