Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 166 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

E.S. Turner, 19 December 1991

Alistair MacLean 
by Jack Webster.
Chapmans, 326 pp., £18, November 1991, 1 85592 519 2
Show More
Alistair MacLean’s Time of the Assassins 
by Alastair MacNeill.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £14.99, December 1991, 0 00 223816 0
Show More
Show More
... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...

Complaining about reviews

John Bayley, 23 May 1985

Mrs Henderson, and Other Stories 
by Francis Wyndham.
Cape, 160 pp., £8.50, April 1985, 0 224 02306 3
Show More
Show More
... her latest reviews. Her monologue is not only a tour de force in the manner of Mrs Gamp and Mr Collins but a piece of criticism as penetrating as it is accidental. The accents of contemporary megalomania are perfectly caught. Some of my very best work went into that book and they’re treating it like a Mills and Boon potboiler, it just doesn’t make ...

How to Plan an Insurrection

Niamh Gallagher: Appropriating James Connolly, 30 November 2023

James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist and Internationalist 
by Liam McNulty.
Merlin, 398 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 85036 783 6
Show More
Show More
... The​ 1996 film Michael Collins shows a badly wounded James Connolly being carried on a stretcher to a chair in Kilmainham Gaol, to which he is tied before being shot by a British firing squad. Connolly was one of the fifteen rebel leaders executed in May 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising, when at least 1200 rebels battled the British forces in Dublin for six days with the aim of establishing an Irish republic ...

Moral Lepers

John Banville: Easter 1916, 16 July 2015

Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 
by R.F. Foster.
Allen Lane, 433 pp., £10.99, May 2015, 978 0 241 95424 9
Show More
Show More
... The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ‘propagandist work was … entirely separatist with practically no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as ...

Gosserie

J.I.M. Stewart, 5 April 1984

Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape 1849-1928 
by Ann Thwaite.
Secker, 567 pp., £15, April 1984, 0 436 52146 6
Show More
Show More
... mean something like ‘went boldly on public record’. To his intimates he was candid enough. To John Blaikie, one of his earliest friends, he recounted in 1874 how, on the occasion of an accident that had put him in fear of death, ‘the Christian revealed religion had never seemed so little worthy of belief.’ When A.C. Benson asked him what he believed ...

New Ground for the Book Trade

John Sutherland, 28 September 1989

... poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ...

Short Cuts

John Lanchester: James Cameron under Water, 26 April 2012

... it’s OK to carry on with the experiment. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and Michael Collins, who circled the Moon while the first two men walked on it, years later admitted to each other that they privately put the mission’s chance of success (read: survival) at 50-50. That level of risk is no longer acceptable for anything carried on in the ...

Diary

Mary-Kay Wilmers: The Menopause, 10 October 1991

... makes Léa give Chéri up for a biologically-appropriate wife. ‘Men,’ man-in-the-news Iron John Bly reports, ‘are more lonesome in every generation.’ In the last few days, as I’ve been getting more and more inflamed in my thoughts about the human (i.e. female, i.e. menopausal) condition, I’ve been hearing a lot about how hard it is being a man ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Fastsellers, 22 March 2001

... were culled from the Bookseller). The current situation in the hit parade is this: were it not for John Grisham, whose A Painted House was leading Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers by 7201 ‘units’ – which presumably means ‘books’ – to 1964 for the week ending 24 February 2001, the end of February would be one of the less impressive times of ...

At the British Museum

Peter Campbell: Samuel Palmer’s dream landscapes, 17 November 2005

... then just out of his teens; a couple of years earlier he had been sought out by an older artist, John Linnell, who had seen and admired his work. Palmer wrote that God had sent Linnell ‘to pluck me from the pit of modernity’. Through Linnell, who was his friend and patron and later his father-in-law, Palmer met William Blake. It was the light of Blake ...

Aardvark

John Bayley: In defence of Larkin, 22 April 1993

... be ideologically sound. Mavericks were common, but true outsiders not. Augustan conformity had its Collins and its Blake and Smart: its mad poets who kicked over the traces. Victorian poetry had to have its nonsense and its horror writers, its Lears and Carrolls and Cities of Dreadful Night. Our version of this today might be Larkinian lugubriousness and ...

Make the music mute

John Barrell, 9 July 1992

English Music 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £14.99, May 1992, 0 241 12501 4
Show More
Show More
... Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with snatches of poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and echoes of De Quincey, Shelley, Frankenstein (not sure about that); and then on to Samuel Palmer to Wuthering Heights to Ford Madox Brown to George Eliot to Whistler to Edwin Drood ...

The Great NBA Disaster

John Sutherland, 19 October 1995

... turnover in 1994. Why was the Thunderer so excited? One reason, as cynics noted, was that Harper-Collins, the publisher leading the charge against the NBA, is Murdoch-owned. Another is that the Times has strenuously opposed the NBA (or its equivalent) for 143 years or more. The paper’s opposition has taken the form of unwavering editorial hostility and, on ...

All Woman

Michael Mason, 23 May 1985

‘Men’: A Documentary 
by Anna Ford.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £10.95, March 1985, 0 297 78468 4
Show More
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure 
by John Cleland, edited by Peter Sabor.
Oxford, 256 pp., £1.95, February 1985, 0 19 281634 9
Show More
Show More
... subtitle might regrettably have carried. The reduction of Anna Ford to the thinking man’s Jackie Collins is complete. This is to state an undoubted unfairness to the intentions of the author, in the presentation of her book. On Ms Ford’s account, its germ is her undergraduate study of social anthropology. There is a fair show of primary research behind ...

Read it on the autobahn

Robert Macfarlane: Vanishing Victorians, 18 December 2003

The Discovery of Slowness 
by Sten Nadolny, translated by Ralph Freedman.
Canongate, 311 pp., £10.99, September 2003, 1 84195 403 9
Show More
Show More
... John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent ...

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