Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 922 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Learned Insane

Simon Schaffer: The Lunar Men, 17 April 2003

The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 588 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 571 19647 0
Show More
Show More
... Soon after his 70th birthday, Charles Darwin sat down to compose a Life of his grandfather Erasmus, poet and sage of 18th-century Lichfield, brilliant physician, mechanical inventor, incorrigible heretic and evolutionist.* The biography was a mix of piety and polemic. Erasmus Darwin’s fate, his chronic diseases, strenuous urging of social and organic progress, and posthumous obloquy, were too close for comfort to his grandson’s hopes and fears ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
Show More
Show More
... are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about ...

The Lobby Falters

John Mearsheimer: Charles Freeman speaks out, 26 March 2009

... Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected ...

A Childhood on the Edge of History

Charles van Onselen: J.M. Coetzee’s boyhood, 5 February 1998

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 171 pp., £12.99, September 1997, 0 436 20448 7
Show More
Show More
... they have been born to, is English. And, as the pool has no discernible ethnos, so one day I hope it will have no predominant colour, as more people of colour drift into it. A pool, I would hope then, in which differences wash away. In this way, and to the consternation of a certain class of cultural crusader for ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Enough about Politics, 15 April 1982

... for the sake of a bypass. Some miles outside Barnstaple down a very muddy lane live my friends Charles and Pamela Gott. Charles and I have been friends for almost sixty years. Indeed, he is almost my only surviving Oxford friend, as distinct from acquaintance. Our mutual affection has remained un-dimmed since the time ...

The wind comes up out of nowhere

Charles Nicholl: The Disappearance of Arthur Cravan, 9 March 2006

... to be a supposition. Did Cravan, in fact, ever make it to Puerto Angel? In the somewhat unlikely hope of an answer I set off for this picturesque little fishing port, four days sailing in Cravan’s ‘little boat’, but nowadays reachable in a few hours by bus on an exhilarating coast road skirting the lower flanks of the Sierra Madre del Sur. An interview ...

Send them to Eton!

Linda Colley, 19 August 1993

The End of the House of Windsor: Birth of a British Republic 
by Stephen Haseler.
Tauris, 208 pp., £14.95, June 1993, 1 85043 735 1
Show More
The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor 
by A.N. Wilson.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 211 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 1 85619 354 3
Show More
Royal Throne: The Future of the Monarchy 
by Elizabeth Longford.
Hodder, 189 pp., £16.99, April 1993, 0 340 58587 0
Show More
Diana v. Charles 
by James Whitaker.
Signet, 237 pp., £14.99, May 1993, 0 670 85245 7
Show More
The Tarnished Crown 
by Anthony Holden.
Bantam, 400 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 0 593 02472 9
Show More
Inheritance: A Psychological History of the Royal Family 
by Dennis Friedman.
Sidgwick, 212 pp., £14.99, April 1993, 0 283 06124 3
Show More
Raine and Johnnie: The Spencers and the Scandal of Althorp 
by Angela Levin.
Weidenfeld, 297 pp., £17.99, July 1993, 0 297 81325 0
Show More
Show More
... dilemma is real and lies less in the antics of its younger representatives, which it can hope some day to resolve, than in massive changes which are completely beyond its control. There is first of all the religious issue. Since the Reformation, the English monarchs have been head of the Church. But since practising Anglicans have come to form only a ...

Time to Mount Spain

Colin Burrow: Prince Charles’s Spanish Adventure, 2 September 2004

The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match 
by Glyn Redworth.
Yale, 200 pp., £25, November 2003, 0 300 10198 8
Show More
Show More
... the most extraordinary incidents in 17th-century English history. On 17 February 1623, the future Charles I and the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The ...

Dynasties

Antonia Fraser, 3 April 1980

The House of Stuart 
by Maurice Ashley.
Dent, 237 pp., £9.95, January 1980, 0 460 04458 3
Show More
Show More
... parallels, as when he compares the court of the pious, abstemious James IV of Scotland to that of Charles II in Whitehall. He is occasionally far-fetched in his treatment of heredity: why should Charles I have inherited his taste from his great-grandfather James V, when his mother Anne of Denmark had strong artistic ...

Antic Santa

James Francken: Nathan Englander, 28 October 1999

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges 
by Nathan Englander.
Faber, 205 pp., £9.99, May 1999, 0 571 19691 8
Show More
Show More
... that Saul Bellow has described, the rules that restrain ‘haughty, spinning, crazy spirit’. Charles Morton Luger, high-flying financial analyst and ‘Christian non-believer’, has an epiphany in the opening paragraph of The Gilgul of Park Avenue’. Not a sudden, dizzying revelation – colours are ‘no brighter or darker’ as he sits in the back of ...

At the National Portrait Gallery

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Lost Prince’, 6 December 2012

... Two of England’s best remembered kings, Henry VIII and Charles I, stand in the shadow of lost princes. Each had an elder brother who was Prince of Wales and expected to succeed. Had Prince Arthur and Prince Henry lived the Reformation and the Civil War would have followed different courses or might not, it is sometimes suggested, have taken place at all ...

Fetch the Chopping Knife

Charles Nicholl: Murder on Bankside, 4 November 2021

... the importance of a plain style suitable for reportage. The epilogue at the end of Arden reads:We hope you’le pardon this naked tragedy,Wherin no filèd points are foisted inTo make it gratious to the eare or eye,For simple truth is gratious enoughAnd needes no other points of glozing stuff.(To ‘gloze’, cognate with ‘gloss’, means ‘to veil with ...

King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
Show More
... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...

Consequences

Christopher Reid, 15 May 1980

Renga 
by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson.
Penguin, 95 pp., £1.95, November 1979, 0 14 042268 4
Show More
Kites in Spring 
by John Hewitt.
Blackstaff, 63 pp., £2.95, February 1980, 0 85640 206 0
Show More
The Island Normal 
by Brian Jones.
Carcanet, 91 pp., £2.95, February 1980, 9780856353406
Show More
New Poetry 5 
edited by Peter Redgrove and Jon Silkin.
Hutchinson, 163 pp., £4.95, November 1979, 0 09 139570 4
Show More
Show More
... composed in Paris more than ten years ago by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson has recently been published here. This work, the result of five days’ collaboration in the basement of the Hôtel St Simon on the left Bank, has both oriental and occidental ancestry. The ceremonial meeting of poets to enact a ritual of ...

He’ll have ye smilin’

Charles Glass: Kissinger’s Duplicity, 20 October 2022

Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy 
by Martin Indyk.
Knopf, 677 pp., £28, October 2021, 978 1 101 94754 8
Show More
Show More
... backwater preoccupied him as he forged detente with the Soviet Union and ‘Red’ China in the hope of extricating the US from its war against Vietnam. The Middle East file fell by default to the then secretary of state, William Rogers, a conventional WASP public servant, Second World War veteran, lawyer and former attorney general. To the annoyance of ...

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