Search Results

Advanced Search

526 to 540 of 840 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Not Just the Money

Mattathias Schwartz: Cybermafia, 5 July 2012

DarkMarket: How Hackers Became the New Mafia 
by Misha Glenny.
Vintage, 432 pp., £8.95, July 2012, 978 0 09 954655 9
Show More
Show More
... battlefield as imagined in Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000) by the RAND Corporation’s John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Technology, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue, will soon make it possible for small clusters of loosely organised military units to conduct brief and co-ordinated strikes, then disperse. Message boards, similarly, allow lone hackers to ...

Oops

Philip Nobel: What makes things break, 21 February 2013

To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure 
by Henry Petroski.
Harvard, 410 pp., £19.95, March 2012, 978 0 674 06584 0
Show More
Show More
... at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City (114 dead). The Brooklyn Bridge stands today because John Roebling designed it to be six times stronger than it needed to be. So when Washington Roebling discovered, after his father’s death, that an unscrupulous supplier had introduced substandard wire into the cables, it was ...

Diary

Eric Hobsbawm: An Assembly of Ghosts, 21 April 2005

... for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles. What is even stranger, I find myself in an assembly of political ghosts. Leaving aside the Chinese, who avoid public discussions, a surprising number of those who made ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: A City of Prose, 4 August 2005

... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...

Drink hard, pray hard and simply vanish

Jack Rakove: The history of the American revolution, 5 April 2001

Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 
by Jon Butler.
Harvard, 324 pp., £19.50, May 2000, 0 674 00091 9
Show More
Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans 
by Joyce Appleby.
Harvard, 322 pp., £17.95, May 2000, 0 674 00236 9
Show More
Show More
... on their way to becoming a distinct American people has a good pedigree, including J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the source of all but one of Butler’s epigraphs. Crèvecoeur’s famous question was: ‘What then is this new man the American?’ His immediate answer – ‘that strange mixture of blood, which you ...

Flirting with Dissolution

Mark Ford: August Kleinzahler, 5 April 2001

Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975-90 
by August Kleinzahler.
Faber, 82 pp., £8.99, September 2000, 0 571 20428 7
Show More
Show More
... Kleinzahler was born in 1949 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just across from the George Washington Bridge. He went to college in Wisconsin, but dropped out and drifted a while, before enrolling at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where his favourite 20th-century poet, Basil Bunting, happened to be teaching that year. Afterwards he ...

A Long Silence

David A. Bell: ‘Englishness’, 14 December 2000

Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 
by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 389 pp., £25, April 2000, 9780198206811
Show More
Show More
... Paris, ‘Are you an Englishman?’ and received the reply: ‘Thank God I am, Sir.’ He quotes Washington Irving’s wonderful description of the English traveller in Italy who had his servant prepare and serve his meals in his carriage: beefsteak, ‘ketchup and soy, and Cayenne pepper, and Harvey sauce, and a bottle of port wine, from that warehouse the ...

Teeter-Totters

Jeremy Harding: Teeter-Tottering on the Border, 20 April 2017

Borderwall as Architecture: A Manifesto for the US-Mexico Boundary 
by Ronald Rael.
California, 184 pp., £24.95, May 2017, 978 0 520 28394 7
Show More
Show More
... wanted 370 miles, the House roughly double. The New York Times was quick to play to the mood in Washington and proposed a troubling parlour game, inviting a handful of architects to design the Congressional project as a neighbourly fence that made the most of its unattractive character, often by pretending it had nothing to do with exclusion. The fence, the ...

Deity with Fairy Wings

Emily Witt: Girlhood, 8 September 2016

The Girls 
by Emma Cline.
Chatto, 355 pp., £12.99, June 2016, 978 1 78474 044 3
Show More
Show More
... to give them the credit of motive that the 27-year-old Cline gives her fictionalised renditions. John Waters dedicated Pink Flamingos to the Manson girls, lampooning the nation’s celebrity obsession with them. In Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s novel about the aftermath of the 1960s, Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello asks his girlfriend if she’ll wear a wig ...

Part of Your America

Kevin Okoth: Danez Smith and Jericho Brown, 19 November 2020

Homie 
by Danez Smith.
Chatto, 96 pp., £10.99, February, 978 1 78474 305 5
Show More
The Tradition 
by Jericho Brown.
Picador, 72 pp., £10.99, August 2019, 978 1 5290 2047 2
Show More
Show More
... is addressed to Rufus, the protagonist of James Baldwin’s novel. Brown follows him to the George Washington Bridge, where he eventually jumps to his death (or freedom): ‘and you leap/Dirty against the whiteness/Of the sky to your escape/Through the whiteness//Of the water.’ Whiteness is all-encompassing: it requires a leap into space – to the stars in ...

My Americas

Donald Davie, 3 September 1981

... assume in the mind if its metropolis were taken to be, not New York or Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, San Francisco or LA, but what the historical records establish as older than any of them, the most ancient city of North America: Santa Fe, New Mexico. And in the years since, that appealing perspective has never been lost sight of ...

National Treasure

Christopher Hitchens, 14 November 1996

Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir 
by John Davis.
Wiley, 256 pp., £14.99, October 1996, 0 471 12945 3
Show More
Show More
... is pretentious unless you are her first cousin or something, which is the status enjoyed by John Davis. His mother was Jackie’s father’s sister, and the list of his previous book-titles (The Bouviers, The Kennedys, The Guggenheims) shows a well-developed sensitivity to the uses of dynasty. This ‘intimate memoir’ joins a seasonal shelf of at ...

Grey Eminence

Edward Said, 5 March 1981

Walter Lippmann and the American Century 
by Ronald Steel.
Bodley Head, 669 pp., £8.95, February 1981, 0 370 30376 8
Show More
Show More
... riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone who counted and being able to defend at least two sides of every major public issue of his time – always favoured him. The list of his friends, his ...

Someone Else, Somewhere Else

Peter Clarke, 13 November 1997

Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals 
edited by Niall Ferguson.
Picador, 548 pp., £20, April 1997, 9780330351324
Show More
Show More
... kind of story, this – not just a routine flight from Orlando but a special flight from Washington DC, as it were, with the President on board. The man from the Pru is still right to think that if it hadn’t been this passenger, in this fatal predicament, it would in all likelihood have been someone else, somewhere else. There is still plenty of ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: On Greensill, 6 May 2021

... a US data firm, and a consultant for the biotech company Illumina. He also registered with Washington Speakers Bureau (through which Theresa May has received more than £600,000 in speaking fees since the pandemic began). In August 2018, Cameron was hired by Greensill as a ‘part-time adviser’ and given share options worth as much as $70 ...

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