Search Results

Advanced Search

46 to 58 of 58 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

People shouldn’t be fat

Zachary Leader, 3 October 1996

Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 
by Simon Callow.
Cape, 640 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 224 03852 4
Show More
Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles 
by David Thomson.
Little, Brown, 460 pp., £20, September 1996, 0 316 91437 1
Show More
Show More
... The womanising may have been epic (‘Years of my life have been given up to it,’ he told Kenneth Tynan), but according to Thomson ‘nobody every got the impression that it mattered much.’ What mattered was the self, as validated in seduction. If Welles was gay, Thomson concludes, ‘he was gay in a way uniquely his: he loved himself.’ A ...

Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
Show More
Show More
... held morally responsible for another’s suicide is a moot point but Elwes’s friends, including Kenneth Tynan, who delivered an outspoken eulogy at his funeral, believed he had been bullied to death having ‘set too much store by the favourable opinions of people many of whom were manifestly his inferiors’. After the service a cousin of Elwes went ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

... Beyond the Fringe, which he thought ‘rather dreary’. I never could think of much to say to Kenneth Tynan or he to me but whenever we met in the early 1960s he’d make a point of telling me that of all the stuff in BTF what ‘Truman’ had most liked was the sermon, I think because it reminded him of the sermons of his boyhood. Whether ...

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8
Show More
Show More
... when I came to edit Isis. I doubt if any Oxford undergraduate – and I include Peter Fleming and Kenneth Tynan – has written so wide-ranging, witty and intelligent a group of pieces over such a short period as Jeremy wrote for Isis that summer. They always turned up on time, perfectly typed and at the right length. Their subjects included ...

A Terrible Thing, Thank God

Adam Phillips: Dylan Thomas, 4 March 2004

Dylan Thomas: A New Life 
by Andrew Lycett.
Weidenfeld, 434 pp., £20, October 2003, 0 297 60793 6
Show More
Show More
... He is a test case for that death of the author that spells the death of the biographer. Thomas, Kenneth Tynan remarked, was ‘a surly little pug, but a master of pastiche and invective. Thinks himself the biggest and best phoney of all time, and may be right!’ Anyone skilled as Thomas was at eliciting other people’s prejudices; anyone who can make ...

No Mythology, No Ghosts

Owen Hatherley: Second City?, 3 November 2022

Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain 
by Richard Vinen.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 0 241 45453 4
Show More
Show More
... ways. This is particularly true of Joseph Chamberlain. Second City is full of Brummies, like Kenneth Tynan or the members of Duran Duran, who successfully pretended they were from somewhere else, but Chamberlain remains far more identified with Birmingham than his native Camberwell. He was its mayor for just three years, between 1873 and 1876, and ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... Sean O’Casey. In 1956 in London he played – to much critical acclaim from critics such as Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson – the part of Seamus Shields in The Shadow of a Gunman. When he was asked to play the part of the railway porter in Beckett’s radio play All That Fall in 1956 he found himself ‘struck tremendously by the writing. It ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2000, 25 January 2001

... The exhibition had been sponsored by the Observer, at that time peopled with fabled beings like Kenneth Tynan, Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee ...

Looking back in anger

Hilary Mantel, 21 November 1991

Almost a Gentleman. An Autobiography: Vol. II 1955-66 
by John Osborne.
Faber, 273 pp., £14.99, November 1991, 0 571 16261 4
Show More
Show More
... it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden ... Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby fan, as Dr Watson ... He would, you feel, have snarled a hole in the screen. A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
Show More
Show More
... and Sinatra; and the frequent company of younger men in theatre and the movies who emulated him (Kenneth Tynan, Peter Bogdanovich). All this is known to Conrad, but the subject of this book is Welles’s life in his art, a life that is made to hang together symptomatically. The chapters are centred on myths or archetypes – ‘Peter ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
Show More
Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
Show More
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
Show More
Show More
... had advised Bloom not to consort with Roth, just as he had cautioned Elaine Dundy not to return to Kenneth Tynan. ‘You have already had Portnoy’s complaint [i.e. Elkins],’ he told Bloom. ‘Do not involve yourself with Portnoy.’ As for Roth, he expressed too great an appetite for adultery to be faithful to Bloom, carrying on a nearly two-decade ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... sort of busy bee.I’m not suggesting you were some foppish, would-be West End theatre figure like Kenneth Tynan. When you started ‘Tomorrow’, though, you must already have had a group of collaborators and contributors you could nobble for the next issue.I’d enjoyed bringing out the Scorpion and had always remembered it. Then I met a Sri ...

Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
Show More
Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
Show More
Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
Show More
Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
Show More
A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
Show More
Show More
... Kenneth Branagh​ ’s Belfast is set in the early months of the Troubles, in a mixed working-class district that is cleared of its Catholic residents by a loyalist mob. Paving stones are lifted to barricade the end of the street. Neighbourhood vigilantes are replaced by paramilitaries and the British army. Though the representation of events is spare and often stylised, the film catches the impact of the crisis not just on smashed and burned terraced houses but on the fabric of everyday decency ...

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