Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 60 of 67 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Untreatable

Gavin Francis: The Spanish Flu, 25 January 2018

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World 
by Laura Spinney.
Jonathan Cape, 352 pp., £20, June 2017, 978 1 910702 37 6
Show More
Show More
... through Russia.The first case of Spanish flu was recorded on 4 March 1918, when a military mess cook called Albert Gitchell in Camp Funston, Kansas, reported sick with a headache and fever. By the following day a hundred others had reported the same symptoms. A hangar was requisitioned to house the men, but flu has an incubation period of a couple of ...

Reminder: Mother

Adam Mars-Jones: Helen Phillips, 2 January 2020

The Need 
by Helen Phillips.
Chatto, 272 pp., £16.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 284 3
Show More
Show More
... Carola Dibbell’s astonishing dystopian novel, published in 2015, The Only Ones.) The squire’s cook is disgusted and made resentful by the imminent birth (‘I can tend a death but I’ve no nerve for birth’) and hands in her notice, something her temporary replacement puts down, in a conversation below stairs, to the nearness of her ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2012, 3 January 2013

... is Last Word, the obituary programme on Radio 4, and The Archive Hour, which on 7 July was about Harold Macmillan – the Night of the Long Knives. This was terrific stuff both in itself, Macmillan always a treat even when he’s being a showman, but also in pointing up the driving down of standards in politics that has occurred since. Taken together with ...

Expendabilia

Hal Foster: Reyner Banham, 9 May 2002

Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future 
by Nigel Whiteley.
MIT, 494 pp., £27.50, January 2002, 0 262 23216 2
Show More
Show More
... the Swinging Sixties in London but also with the techie progressivism of the Labour Party under Harold Wilson. This imperative led Banham to his first polemic against Pevsner et al’s rationalist reading of Modernist architecture, which was doxa by the time Theory and Design in the First Machine Age appeared. According to Banham, the architects elevated to ...

America’s Non-Compliance

Gareth Peirce: The Case against Extradition, 13 May 2010

... as others in secret sites around the world). Although at least one senior State Department lawyer, Harold Koh, maintains that the new administration’s changes mean that the United States can now claim that its national security policies are fully compliant with domestic and international law under ‘common and universal standards, not double ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... cavernous kitchens in the basement and of two women who moved about in them – Mrs Benjamin, the cook, who was massive and dressed in butcher’s blue, and a diminutive grey-haired person in a drab overall called Janey, a sort of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after ...

The Wrong Blond

Alan Bennett, 23 May 1985

Auden in Love 
by Dorothy Farnan.
Faber, 264 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 571 13399 1
Show More
Show More
... but in his biography of Auden Humphrey Carpenter gives Kallman’s fancied companion as the poet Harold Norse. Norse thinks Auden was expecting him. The right blond and ready to be just as obliging as Kallman, Norse was a better bet all round. This is one of those moments when three, possibly four lives go rattling over the points. But Norse or Miller? Auden ...

Chianti in Khartoum

Nick Laird: Louis MacNeice, 3 March 2011

Letters of Louis MacNeice 
edited by Jonathan Allison.
Faber, 768 pp., £35, May 2010, 978 0 571 22441 8
Show More
Show More
... 4 or by Dialectical Materialism or by the Cross of Christ. Etc. etc. etc. Droning & droning. The cook in my professor’s house at Oxford suddenly the other day began cursing Hitler Homerically – ‘I’ll cut out his inside & rub salt in it, I’ll cut off his leg & make him look at it etc.’ The bulk of the post-Oxford letters are practical. They ...

American Manscapes

Richard Poirier, 12 October 1989

Manhood and the American Renaissance 
by David Leverenz.
Cornell, 372 pp., $35.75, April 1989, 0 8014 2281 7
Show More
Show More
... With some notable exceptions early on, like F.O. Matthiessen, Marius Bewley and Leslie Fiedler, in Harold Bloom’s critical admixture of Emerson and Wilde, and in the work now being done by a few young Americanists, this sort of oversight has been par for the course of American studies, where the making of English-American connections is, it seems, suspected ...
... Some younger people saw her as a sort of relic – people like the Sitwells and Ronald Firbank and Harold Acton – but all that rather bored her. She was very up to the minute, and would be full of the latest musical comedy or the latest thing that had been written. But she wrote a memoir of Wilde, which I published along with his letters to her in a magazine ...

Hayek and His Overcoat

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 October 1998

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 
by David Landes.
Little, Brown, 650 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 316 90867 3
Show More
The Commanding Heights 
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp., £18.99, February 1998, 0 684 82975 4
Show More
Show More
... to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more than from above, can think in terms of a growing pie.’ That is why they become rich. And that is ...

Puzzled Puss

John Lahr: Buster Keaton’s Star Turn, 19 January 2023

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life 
by James Curtis.
Knopf, 810 pp., £30, February 2022, 978 0 385 35421 9
Show More
Show More
... mansions: a two-storey five-bedroom Italianate villa which housed six servants, including a cook, butler, chauffeur and governess for their two sons. He had married into the serene and secure Talmadge matriarchy, ruled by their pragmatic mother, ‘Peg’, who used the house as her headquarters. ‘There was never any “make, make, make” when he got ...

Time for Several Whiskies

Ian Jack: BBC Propaganda, 30 August 2018

Auntie’s War: The BBC during the Second World War 
by Edward Stourton.
Doubleday, 422 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 85752 332 7
Show More
Show More
... purvey to the Ministry [of Information] the raw meat and vegetables and for the ministry to cook and serve the dish to the public’. At a cabinet meeting, he deplored ‘the unrelieved pessimism’ of BBC bulletins and their ‘long account of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
Show More
Show More
... until his final illness in 1975. As an employee of Lunn Poly, then later Thomson’s and Thomas Cook, Desmond got cheap travel as a perk, and the Fitzgeralds became great takers of package holidays, visiting the Alps in 1965 then Elba, Florence, Turkey, Madrid. The trips were done ‘on a shoestring’, the girls eating the free bread and olive oil in one ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
Show More
Show More
... woman who was constantly trying to help people out of their personal difficulties – offering to cook them meals, sending them flowers, showering them with concern – was recognisably the same person of whom Jim Prior complained to Hugo Young in 1981: ‘She hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole cabinet. One reason she has no friend is that she ...

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