Search Results

Advanced Search

541 to 555 of 742 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
Show More
‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
Show More
John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
Show More
John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
Show More
Show More
... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...

Wash out your ears

Adam Shatz: Messiaen’s Ecstasies, 20 February 2025

Olivier Messiaen: A Critical Biography 
by Robert Sholl.
Reaktion, 255 pp., £25, May 2024, 978 1 78914 865 7
Show More
Messiaen in Context 
edited by Robert Sholl.
Cambridge, 348 pp., £95, November 2023, 978 1 108 48791 7
Show More
Show More
... Messiaen’s goal, exactly: he wrote music to praise God, not to proselytise. Nonetheless, as Robert Sholl argues in his ‘critical biography’, it’s not easy to disentangle Messiaen’s art from his belief that in composing he was ‘making a transcendent God empirical and sensate’. The music, Sholl suggests, allows ‘believers and non-believers ...

Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 
edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.
Penguin, 208 pp., £1.95, October 1982, 0 14 042283 8
Show More
The Rattle Bag 
edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Faber, 498 pp., £10, October 1982, 0 571 11966 2
Show More
Show More
... accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides’ – the high green meadows and the blue-green bellies of the flies. Plath’s poem, like a superior terror movie, pointed all its verbal skills towards panic and emptiness, but what endures today is the art-work, the blackberries themselves ...

I’m a Cahunian

Adam Mars-Jones: Claude Cahun, 2 August 2018

Never Anyone But You 
by Rupert Thomson.
Corsair, 340 pp., £18.99, June 2018, 978 1 4721 5350 0
Show More
Show More
... Moore and Claude Cahun (1920). Thomson’s sharp sketches of the women’s intimates, such as Robert Desnos, Edouard de Max and Henri Michaux, are more successful than the cameo appearances or conversational allusions. Names like Hemingway or Lacan can’t be brought into play without making a thud or a clang. No doubt people at Paris parties in the 1920s ...

Bitten by an Adder

Tim Parks: ‘The Return of the Native’, 17 July 2014

The Return of the Native 
by Thomas Hardy, edited by Simon Avery.
Broadview, 512 pp., £9.50, April 2013, 978 1 55481 070 3
Show More
Show More
... have passed by without recognising him. He was a brown spot in the midst of an expanse of olive-green gorse, and nothing more. Though frequently depressed in spirit when not actually at work, owing to thoughts of Eustacia’s position and his mother’s estrangement, when in the full swing of labour he was cheerfully disposed and calm. His daily life was ...

The Political Economy of Carbon Trading

Donald MacKenzie: A Ratchet, 5 April 2007

... 1990, which introduced sulphur dioxide trading. Economists such as MIT’s Richard Schmalensee and Robert Stavins of Harvard’s Kennedy School also became involved. They didn’t simply advocate a cap and trade scheme, but helped it gain political acceptance. The 1990 legislation differed from what economists might have wanted in two respects. First, there ...

Summer with Empson

Jonathan Raban: Learning to Read, 5 November 2009

... Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to sentences, stopping the game at intervals to listen to the BBC news crackling from the wireless, its fretwork grill sawn to represent an inappropriately Japanese-style rising sun. By the time ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
Show More
Show More
... light tax regime, no limits on the interest rates and late fees creditors can charge, and a quick green light to home foreclosures for those whose payments are in arrears.‘It puts me in a precarious financial position when you fellows don’t pay,’ Joe Biden wrote to his tenants when he was a landlord in his mid-twenties. ‘To get right down to it, I ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single shades of green, brown and yellow, marked at the join by hedges and lines of trees and narrow lanes. Farmed fields, in other words. We perceive the countryside as if farmed fields were the default state, as if the two were synonymous. But why should this be true, when so ...

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

... that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did not think too serious until he explained they were required for balance (I understood balance in the negative context of not having enough of it, hence those shameful safety wheels fastened to my bicycle).At some ...

The End of British Farming

Andrew O’Hagan: British farming, 22 March 2001

... used a bottle of prescription olive oil to clean the salad bowl. Now look!’ A line of tank-green bottles stretched into the distance. ‘Choice!’ she said.Supermarket people like to use certain words. When you are with them in the fruit department they all say ‘fresh’ and ‘juicy’ and ‘variety’ and ‘good farming practices’. (Or as head ...

Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 4 December 1986

... practice. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to present jury history as a whole is Thomas Andrew Green’s Verdict according to Conscience. The book is subtitled ‘Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800’. It sets out briskly and well in difficult Medieval terrain, begins to falter in the 17th century, and collapses in a heap with ...

Sabotage

Gavin Millar, 13 September 1990

Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles 
by Frank Brady.
Hodder, 655 pp., £18.95, January 1990, 0 340 51389 6
Show More
If this was happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 312 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 297 79630 5
Show More
Norma Shearer 
by Gavin Lambert.
Hodder, 381 pp., £17.95, August 1990, 0 340 52947 4
Show More
Ava’s Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner 
by Jane Ellen Wayne.
Robson, 268 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 86051 636 9
Show More
Goldwyn: A Biography 
by Scott Berg.
Hamish Hamilton, 579 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 241 12832 3
Show More
The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-Making in the Studio Era 
by Thomas Schatz.
Simon and Schuster, 514 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 671 69708 0
Show More
Show More
... listeners falling downstairs and jumping out of windows in an effort to escape the little green men. The newspapers jumped on the bandwagon, calling for more government regulation of radio, much as they do now for television. When the Mercury Theatre’s Danton’s Death opened to mixed reviews the following week, they were quick to pounce. ‘For the ...

Say hello to Rodney

Peter Wollen: How art becomes kitsch, 17 February 2000

The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience 
by Celeste Olalquiaga.
Bloomsbury, 321 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 7475 4535 9
Show More
Show More
... different from an ‘Atlantis’ reconstructed on a Bahamian beach or the fake ruins of Hubert Robert, both of which she gives as examples of kitsch, just because one is real, the others fake, one melancholic, the others nostalgic? Both categories of object seem to me to trade on the viewer’s engrained sentiments and predictable responses. In this ...

Empty Cookie Jar

Donald MacKenzie: Ethnoaccountancy, 22 May 2003

Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego and the Death of Enron 
by Robert Bryce.
PublicAffairs, 394 pp., £9.99, November 2002, 1 903985 54 4
Show More
Enron: The Rise and Fall 
by Loren Fox.
Wiley, 384 pp., £18.50, October 2002, 0 471 23760 4
Show More
Show More
... traders and saying, “Buy it, I don’t care what the price is, buy it,”’ one attendee told Robert Bryce. As New York closes, the announcement comes. Enron, which began by owning pipelines carrying natural gas, is going to organise the trading of ‘bandwidth’ (capacity) in pipelines that carry information, the fibre-optic cables of the Internet. At ...

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