Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 40 of 40 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Only Alphabet

August Kleinzahler: Ashbery’s Early Life, 21 September 2017

The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life 
by Karin Roffman.
Farrar, Straus, 316 pp., £25.50, June 2017, 978 0 374 29384 0
Show More
Show More
... five stanzas, ending with a cleverly ironic twist. His aunt Jane sent the poem to her cousin Elizabeth Sherwood Rinehart, who passed it to her mother-in-law, Mary Roberts Rinehart, a popular mystery writer. Ashbery was told his poem had received ‘great acclaim’. Having thus conquered the realm of poetry, for the ...

When Bitcoin Grows Up

John Lanchester: What is Money?, 21 April 2016

... money, the English five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty. On the other we have a picture of the queen, and just above that the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of’, and then the value of the ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
Show More
Show More
... Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The ...

How Utterly Depraved!

Deborah Friedell: What did Ethel know?, 1 July 2021

Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy 
by Anne Sebba.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 0 297 87100 2
Show More
Show More
... interviews with the FBI, he now said that Ethel had typed up his notes. Decades later, he told Sam Roberts, the author of The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case (2001), that he didn’t actually remember if it had been Ethel or his wife who had done the typing: ‘I told them a story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So ...

Illuminating, horrible etc

Jenny Turner: David Foster Wallace, 14 April 2011

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace 
by David Lipsky.
Broadway, 320 pp., $16.99, 9780307592439
Show More
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel 
by David Foster Wallace.
Hamish Hamilton, 547 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 0 241 14480 0
Show More
Show More
... to the meditative practices of so many of the world’s religions, from Ignatius Loyola to Julia Roberts in her ridiculous ashram in the film of Elizabeth Gilbert’s yogatastic self-fest, Eat, Pray, Love. It seems to me that the knockabout bit about TV golf doesn’t quite cover up a sentimentality, a bit of an ...

Life at the Pastry Board

Stefan Collini: V.S. Pritchett, 4 November 2004

V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life 
by Jeremy Treglown.
Chatto, 308 pp., £25, October 2004, 9780701173227
Show More
Show More
... drifted into sexless unhappiness, and they divorced in the early 1930s. By then he had met Dorothy Roberts, 14 years his junior, and with her he found passionate love and sexual fulfilment. It was the beginning of a very long marriage (she outlived him), but it was also for her the beginning of her job in the word-factory. Pritchett had more than his share of ...

As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes

Jenny Turner: On Feminism, 15 December 2011

... with the less privileged sisters. And yet, the strange thing is how often they haven’t: Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed votes for freedmen; Betty Friedan made the epoch-defining suggestion that middle-class American women should dump the housework on ‘full-time help’. There are so many examples of this sort that it would be funny if it weren’t ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... inaugural address carried the stamp of hot ambition even in its salutation: ‘Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.’ What were the people of the world doing here? It has been conjectured that Trump was greeting a blood-brotherhood of populari ...

Upriver

Iain Sinclair: The Thames, 25 June 2009

Thames: Sacred River 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Vintage, 608 pp., £14.99, August 2008, 978 0 09 942255 6
Show More
Show More
... a recalibrating of history: as a hospital or asylum vanishes, we thirst for stories of Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury or Pocahontas coming ashore, in her dying fever, at Gravesend. The documented records of the lives of those unfortunates shipped out to cholera hospitals on Dartford Marshes, or secure madhouses in the slipstream of the M25, can be dumped ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... and said goodbye. The first long season of mourning was over and a new darkness lay ahead. Elizabeth Campbell talking to a member of the public in September 2017. On​ Monday, 11 December 2017, on Radio 4’s Today programme, it was made clear to Elizabeth Campbell, the new leader of Kensington and Chelsea ...

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