Search Results

Advanced Search

601 to 615 of 856 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The President and the Bomb

Adam Shatz, 16 November 2017

... the US ‘on the path to World War Three’. Corker is one of a handful of Republicans, along with John McCain and Jeff Flake, who now seem more afraid of what Trump might do to the world than of what he might do to them. What sort of war does Trump risk detonating? The most frightening scenario is war between ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘the Dotard’ (as Kim ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
Show More
Show More
... Post Review of 1945) and ‘get a life’ (which it’s hard to believe wasn’t used before the Washington Post of 23 January 1983). ‘Sayings’ occupy the indefinable hinterland between proverbs and the kind of thing usually called ‘quotations’, which are remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George ...

A Family of Acrobats

Adam Mars-Jones: Teju Cole, 3 July 2014

Every Day Is for the Thief 
by Teju Cole.
Faber, 162 pp., £12.99, April 2014, 978 0 571 30792 0
Show More
Show More
... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...

Suspicious

Tariq Ali: Richard Sorge’s Fate, 21 November 2019

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent 
by Owen Matthews.
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 4088 5778 6
Show More
Show More
... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who ...

In Your Face

Evgeny Morozov: Surveillance Technology, 5 April 2012

Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance 
by Kelly Gates.
NYU Press, 261 pp., £15.99, March 2011, 978 0 8147 3210 6
Show More
Show More
... even imperfect FRT can be useful. Suppose you have just photographed a man who claims to be John Smith. How can a computer establish whether he is the same John Smith who exists in your database? First, it needs to find the man’s face in the picture – by looking for blob-like regions with consistent brightness and ...

Time of the Red-Man

Mark Ford: James Fenimore Cooper, 25 September 2008

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years 
by Wayne Franklin.
Yale, 708 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 300 10805 7
Show More
Show More
... and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after him, Irving had taken up his pen partly in response to financial ...

Beast of a Nation

Andrew O’Hagan: Scotland’s Self-Pity, 31 October 2002

Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland 
by Neal Ascherson.
Granta, 305 pp., £16.99, September 2002, 1 86207 524 7
Show More
Show More
... to another, which can become a fairly gentle way of describing your own personal history, too. John Smith, the late Labour leader, believed a devolved Scottish parliament was ‘the settled will of the Scottish people’. He died too young and is buried now on the Isle of Iona, in what is thought to have been the graveyard of the Scottish kings. There’s ...

‘I’m not signing’

Mike Jay: Franco Basaglia, 8 September 2016

The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care 
by John Foot.
Verso, 404 pp., £20, August 2015, 978 1 78168 926 4
Show More
Show More
... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...

Red Flag, Green Light

Rosa Lyster: Keep the Con Going, 16 November 2023

Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World 
by Yepoka Yeebo.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5266 6857 8
Show More
Show More
... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...

Diary

Leo Robson: What I Saw at the Movies, 6 November 2025

... exercise book with star ratings and plot synopses for Meg Ryan romantic comedies, Disney cartoons, John Grisham adaptations, disaster movies and action thrillers, along with harder-breathing fare from the Dogme 95 group and Leos Carax’s Pola X, remorselessly grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as ...

Babylon

William Rodgers, 30 March 1989

European Diary 1977-1981 
by Roy Jenkins.
Collins, 698 pp., £25, March 1989, 0 00 217976 8
Show More
Show More
... and his long personal acquaintance with the United States, he could discuss Community business in Washington with authority and hope of influence. But the politics of the Community would remain frustrating. It was as if Low’s famous TUC carthorse had lumbered across the Channel and was now harnessed to the European ideal. Roy Jenkins had one important ...

Baghdad’s Ruling Cliques

Keith Kyle, 15 August 1991

The Iraqi Revolution of 1958: The Old Social Classes Revisited 
edited by Robert Fernea and William Roger Louis.
Tauris, 232 pp., £35, May 1991, 1 85043 318 6
Show More
Instant Empire: Saddam Hussein’s Ambition for Iraq 
by Simon Henderson.
Mercury House, 271 pp., £8.99, June 1991, 1 56279 007 2
Show More
Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography 
by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi.
Brassey, 307 pp., £17.95, April 1991, 0 08 041326 9
Show More
The Gulf Between Us: The Gulf War and Beyond 
edited by Victoria Brittain.
Virago, 186 pp., £5.99, June 1991, 1 85381 386 9
Show More
Under Siege in Kuwait: A Survivor’s Story 
by Jadranka Porter.
Gollancz, 250 pp., £4.99, July 1991, 9780575051850
Show More
Show More
... more mutually supportive. It was not that the British were unaware of the dangers of this. Sir John Troutbeck, one of the two Ambassadors of the Fifties examined in the chapter by William Roger Louis, was outspokenly crit ical of the immense social gaps, and in his view Western education had only made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded ...

Listen to the women

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 21 October 1993

An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution 
by Partha Dasgupta.
Oxford, 661 pp., £35, July 1993, 0 19 828756 9
Show More
Show More
... in short, restructure themselves. And uninterested now in pursuing its Cold War in the South, Washington added that they should think about becoming ‘democratic’. By the end of the Eighties, funds were flowing back from the South to the North, incomes in Latin America and Africa were lower than they’d been in the late Seventies, and except in India ...

More Pasts Than One

Eric Foner, 23 March 1995

Telling the Truth about History 
by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob.
Norton, 322 pp., £19.95, August 1994, 0 393 03615 4
Show More
Show More
... National Endowment for the Humanities, has condemned the plan because, among other things, George Washington is mentioned less frequently than Harriet Tubman, who led groups of slaves to freedom before the Civil War. Ms Cheney seems not to appreciate the difference between a set of curricular guidelines and a textbook. Topics mandated under the new ...

End of Empire

Philip Towle, 22 February 1990

... and international opposition. More important, however, was the weakness of the British economy and Washington’s determination to undermine the pound if the invasion went ahead. In 1989 Washington’s indifference to UN protests against its actions showed how the value put on such pressure had declined in the intervening ...

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