Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 90 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Unmuscular Legs

E.S. Turner, 22 August 1996

The Dictionary of National Biography 1986-1990 
edited by C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 607 pp., £50, June 1996, 0 19 865212 7
Show More
Show More
... urologist, after retirement, had to be given ‘very firm encouragement’ to stop operating). As Leslie Stephen, first editor, once said, much of the value of the DNB lies in the light it sheds on the lives of the second-rate, meaning second-rank, about whom it is not easy to find information elsewhere. If we do not need it for Lord Blake’s long piece ...

Mrs G

John Bayley, 11 March 1993

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 690 pp., £20, February 1993, 0 571 15182 5
Show More
Show More
... her personal character’. James’s view was not untypical of the masculine response of the time. Leslie Stephen, a friend and near-contemporary of Mrs Gaskell, regarded her achievements in much the same light as he would have done those of his own daughter; and Jenny Uglow is surely right to stress the implicit comeback in the Gaskell novels, which show ...

Phantom Gold

John Pemble: Victorian Capitalism, 7 January 2016

Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds and the Rise of Modern Finance 
by Ian Klaus.
Yale, 287 pp., £18.99, January 2015, 978 0 300 18194 4
Show More
Show More
... described a typically bourgeois sense of insecurity when she recalled the attitude of her father, Leslie Stephen, to money: ‘Not all his mathematics together with a bank balance which he insisted must be ample in the extreme, could persuade him, when it came to writing a cheque, that the whole family was not “shooting Niagara to ruin”.’ The ...

Phut-Phut

James Wood: The ‘TLS’, 27 June 2002

Critical Times: The History of the ‘Times Literary Supplement’ 
by Derwent May.
HarperCollins, 606 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 00 711449 4
Show More
Show More
... and interest, and May briefly – too briefly – kindles to it. Woolf compacted her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and those like him, into a double-headed institution, ‘Eton-Cambridge’. (Bruce Richmond was, in fact, Winchester-Oxford.) They kept the cultural wheels of Empire turning, and were necessary, ‘like Roman roads’. The TLS was stuffed ...

Grateful Dead

John Barrell, 22 April 1993

The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons 
edited by C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 790 pp., £80, January 1993, 0 19 865211 9
Show More
Show More
... been famous (the great set-piece biographies of literary figures, for example, many of them by Leslie Stephen), rather more in the brief sketches it gives of characters whose inclusion may in many cases have been the outcome of some very marginal decisions. With the perversity of hindsight it is arguble that the original DNB would be still more ...

Drugs, anyone?

Seamus Perry: George Meredith, 18 June 2015

Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads 
by George Meredith, edited by Criscillia Benford and Rebecca Mitchell.
Yale, 390 pp., £40, April 2015, 978 0 300 17317 8
Show More
Show More
... I found out in more than one long exhausting walk and vigorous playful tussles, was unwearying.’ Leslie Stephen, one of Meredith’s friends, eulogised the effects of an invigorating tramp in the country in the true spirit: ‘You can consume your modest sandwiches, light your pipe, and feel more virtuous, and thoroughly at peace with the universe, than ...

What sort of man?

P.N. Furbank, 18 August 1994

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Vol. I: 1854-April 1874 
edited by Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew.
Yale, 525 pp., £29.95, July 1994, 0 300 05183 2
Show More
The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Vol. II: April 1874-July 1879 
edited by Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew.
Yale, 352 pp., £29.95, July 1994, 0 300 06021 1
Show More
Show More
... wife Fanny Osbourne. All this time he had been practising to write. With the encouragement of Leslie Stephen, he had had an essay and article or two published; and during 1878 he published the stories later collected as his New Arabian Nights. In June 1878 Fanny’s husband ordered her to return to America. Louis went on a solitary walking tour in ...

Only Men in Mind

Susan Pedersen: R.H. Tawney, 21 August 2014

The Life of R.H. Tawney 
by Lawrence Goldman.
Bloomsbury, 411 pp., £65, September 2013, 978 1 78093 704 5
Show More
Show More
... is itself part of a long and distinctively British tradition. It is the framework Leslie Stephen adopted for the Dictionary of National Biography and thus one that Goldman – outgoing editor of the Oxford DNB – comes by honestly. The closeness of Tawney’s and Goldman’s professional paths is also a hallmark of this tradition in ...

Rare, Obsolete, New, Peculiar

Daisy Hay: Dictionary People, 19 October 2023

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary 
by Sarah Ogilvie.
Chatto, 384 pp., £22, September, 978 1 78474 493 9
Show More
Show More
... Victorian infrastructure projects: the building of the Forth rail bridge, or the construction by Leslie Stephen (himself a contributor to the OED) of his monumental Dictionary of National Biography.Ogilvie points out that for many years the OED wasn’t as stable or institutionally protected as such analogies suggest. Its founders were determined that ...

Aubade before Breakfast

Tom Crewe: Balfour and the Souls, 31 March 2016

Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Nancy Ellenberger.
Boydell, 414 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 1 78327 037 8
Show More
Show More
... much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel Octavia, ‘brought up in an atmosphere of Scotch austerity’ but with ‘a spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her like a kite at the end of a string’. George ...

No Clapping

Rosemary Hill: The Bloomsbury Memoir Club, 17 July 2014

The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club 
by S.P. Rosenbaum, edited by James Haule.
Palgrave, 203 pp., £20, January 2014, 978 1 137 36035 9
Show More
Show More
... biographical talent. Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell grew up in the heavy shadow of their father, Leslie Stephen, who was not only the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, but also the author of a private memoir his children called the Mausoleum Book, written for his family after the death of his wife. Keynes’s mother had written a ...

Resurrecting the Tudors

John Pemble: James Anthony Froude, 23 May 2013

James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet 
by Ciaran Brady.
Oxford, 500 pp., £45, May 2013, 978 0 19 966803 8
Show More
Show More
... he’d discovered that ‘the object was to get the supernatural believed in somehow.’ Like Leslie Stephen, and like many Catholics, he reckoned that Newman was a sceptic who’d opted out, and was all the more dangerous for being insecure in his new allegiance. His History of England therefore strives to nullify Newman by pulverising the Catholic ...

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
... obscurity, on mortality and immortality. And then there’s the respectable nerdiness of it all. Leslie Stephen, founding editor in the 1880s of the original DNB, hoped that it would turn out to be one of the ‘most amusing’ of books. This remark may have to be interpreted in the light of the fact that Stephen’s ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
Show More
Show More
... a more ‘sensible’ man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance’. But if we take Tetty’s ‘sensible’ to mean – as in this period it ...

Short Cuts and Half Cuts

Luke Kennard: ‘Early Work’, 20 June 2019

Early Work 
by Andrew Martin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.50, July 2019, 978 1 250 21501 7
Show More
Show More
... to get by in. Excepting one roundly mocked character who announces he’s going to be the next Stephen King, Pete’s contemporaries dream of artistic fulfilment – and perhaps an adjunct teaching position at a state college – rather than financial success. But perhaps the point is that the bohemian lifestyle has been absorbed into the regular ...

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