Search Results

Advanced Search

601 to 615 of 1029 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Cronyism and Clientelism

Peter Geoghegan, 5 November 2020

... in his Bromley and Chislehurst constituency. A couple of months earlier, another Conservative MP, David Morris, apologised for lobbying on behalf of an energy firm that had given him £10,000. Morris had urged the energy minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, to lobby Ofgem to change regulations in ways that could benefit Aquind Limited, which is seeking to build an ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... politics on the fringes of the right. Its CEO, Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer, is married to David Stroud, founder of the charismatic megachurch network Christ Church London. Members of the advisory board include the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection ...

How not to do it

John Sutherland, 22 July 1993

The British Library: For Scholarship, Research and Innovation: Strategic Objectives for the Year 2000 
British Library, 39 pp., £5, June 1993, 0 7123 0321 9Show More
The Library of the British Museum: Retrospective Essays on the Department of Printed Books 
edited by P.R. Harris.
British Library, 305 pp., £35, June 1993, 0 7123 0242 5
Show More
Show More
... of the ‘National Bibliographic Service Organisational Chart’; ‘Boston Spa Director General David Russon viewing new digital storage and transmission equipment’ (‘Director General’! – Gogol lives); the conveyor channels of the new ‘Mechanical Book Handling System’ (tactfully, the Electric Dutch shelves which ran amok compacting their ...

Mary, Mary

Christopher Hitchens, 8 April 1993

Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover 
by Anthony Summers.
Gollancz, 576 pp., £18.99, March 1993, 0 575 04236 2
Show More
Show More
... This in turn might go some way to explaining his psychopathic, prurient hatred for Martin Luther King. Hoover was compulsive in his taping and bugging of King’s highly virile private life, and in his campaign to use the tapes for blackmail. He officiated in the twisted plan to send ...

A Sense of Humour in Daddy’s Presence

J.L. Nelson: Medieval Europe, 5 June 2003

The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe 
by Patrick Geary.
Princeton, £11.95, March 2003, 0 691 09054 8
Show More
Europe in the High Middle Ages 
by William Chester Jordan.
Penguin, 383 pp., £9.99, August 2002, 0 14 016664 5
Show More
Show More
... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...

How do you see Susan?

Mary Beard: No Asp for Zenobia, 20 March 2003

Cleopatra: Beyond the Myth 
by Michel Chauveau, translated by David Lorton.
Cornell, 104 pp., £14.95, April 2002, 0 8014 3867 5
Show More
The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations 
by Maria Wyke.
Oxford, 452 pp., £40, March 2002, 9780198150756
Show More
Show More
... terribly wrong. In 61 BC, for example, in the triumph of Pompey the Great – then victorious over King Mithridates, though later defeated by his arch-rival Julius Caesar in the civil wars of the early 40s BC – the extravagance of the artwork proved counterproductive in the eyes of some. In his encyclopedic Natural History, Pliny the Elder gleefully bemoaned ...

Words as Amulets

Ange Mlinko: Barbara Guest’s Poems, 3 December 2009

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest 
edited by Hadley Haden Guest.
Wesleyan, 525 pp., £33.95, July 2008, 978 0 8195 6860 1
Show More
Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions 
by Maggie Nelson.
Iowa, 288 pp., £38.50, December 2007, 978 1 58729 615 4
Show More
Show More
... of the New York School, but was a Platonist at heart: ‘One must live in sovereign freedom like a king,’ she declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never ...

Diary

Max Hastings: Letters from the Front, 10 September 2015

... in the grass behind his dugout. He arrived in France as a willing, if not eager, officer of the king. By autumn, however, he understood that the death that had overtaken a steady stream of his comrades was highly likely to come to him too. In one pathetic note to my grandfather, at that time a popular playwright, he asked him to try to use his influence to ...

‘Wondered at as an owl’

Blair Worden: Cromwell’s Bad Idea, 7 February 2002

Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution 
by Christopher Durston.
Manchester, 270 pp., £15.99, May 2001, 0 7190 6065 6
Show More
Show More
... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...

A Wonder and a Scandal

Peter Campbell: Titian, 5 April 2001

Titian: The Complete Paintings 
by Filippo Pedrocco and Maria Agnese Chiari Moreto Weil.
Thames and Hudson, 336 pp., £50, March 2001, 0 500 09297 4
Show More
Show More
... have liked a little more attention paid to his finery – including the gold chain he had from the King of France. Or then again, as a note here suggests, he may have been taking care of his ‘delicate relationship’ with Cosimo by distancing himself from Titian, who owed Cosimo a portrait. (Aretino made his money lampooning and flattering princes. Titian ...

Best at Imitation

Anthony Pagden: Spain v. England, 2 November 2006

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 
by J.H. Elliott.
Yale, 546 pp., £25, May 2006, 0 300 11431 1
Show More
Show More
... of James I, so Cortés’s expedition had been made possible by private Spanish financiers. The ‘king’ Powhatan was clearly no Montezuma, and Newport’s attempt to crown him (with a copper crown) ended in farce. His ‘empire’ was no empire, and contained none of the wealth Mexico was rapidly seen to possess. Nor was Newport in any position to offer to ...

Will we notice when the Tories have won?

Ross McKibbin: Election Blues, 24 September 2009

... Party does have a libertarian tradition and some belief in the free-born Englishman, whom David Davis surprisingly and quixotically left the front bench to defend. But it’s a tradition more likely to protect people’s pleasures than their rights, and Thatcherism, which was anything but libertarian, almost killed it off. Where these conflicting ...

Paths to Restitution

Jeremy Harding: Leopold’s Legacy, 5 June 2025

... the Congolese. This arrangement continued until 1908, when ownership of the Congo passed from the king to the Belgian state.By then the old palace was too small for its burgeoning contents. Leopold had already foreseen this and commissioned Charles Girault, the architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, to design a larger building, which opened in 1910, a year ...

American Breakdown

David Bromwich, 2 August 2018

... has gone on to normalise the extreme aberration in a way that recalls the passive compliance of King Victor Emmanuel III in 1922 and Field Marshal Hindenburg in 1933. Yet it is the ‘resistance’ warriors in the popular culture who have gone furthest to take political confrontation to a perilous edge. Robert De Niro led a cheer of ‘Fuck Trump’ at the ...

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... the sheriff of Nottingham. Two figures stand between the sheriff and the poor. One is the absent king. He carries a monarch’s title, but exists only to represent benign authority, order and justice, the kinder, fairer authority that existed before he went away, naively leaving the sheriff to govern in his name and pervert his wishes, the same authority he ...

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