Search Results

Advanced Search

676 to 690 of 991 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Can that woman sleep?

Bee Wilson: Bad Samaritan, 24 October 2024

Madame Restell: The Life, Death and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless and Infamous Abortionist 
by Jennifer Wright.
Hachette, 352 pp., £17.99, May, 978 0 306 82681 8
Show More
Show More
... a point. It was across from what would become the new St Patrick’s Cathedral. The archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, had intended to buy the land for his own residence but was outbid by Restell – payback for his denunciation of her from the pulpit. In revenge, Wright says, she built ‘a house so ostentatious that parishioners at St Patrick’s would be ...

Upper and Lower Cases

Tom Nairn, 24 August 1995

A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 
edited by John Robertson.
Cambridge, 368 pp., £40, April 1995, 0 521 43113 1
Show More
The Autonomy of Modern Scotland 
by Lindsay Paterson.
Edinburgh, 218 pp., £30, September 1994, 0 7486 0525 8
Show More
Show More
... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...

Homage to Education

Colin McGinn, 16 August 1990

Essays in political Philosophy 
by R.G. Collingwood, edited by David Boucher.
Oxford, 237 pp., £25, November 1989, 0 19 824823 7
Show More
The Social and Political Thought of R.G. Collingwood 
by David Boucher.
Cambridge, 300 pp., £27.50, November 1989, 0 521 36384 5
Show More
Show More
... young Robin was educated at home, where he showed remarkable precocity. His father, who was John Ruskin’s secretary, undertook the task of educating his son himself; Robin received from him a very wide and thorough education – in ancient and modern languages, history, science, music, art. In his Autobiography Collingwood reports having had a certain ...

Glasgow über Alles

Julian Loose, 8 July 1993

Swing Hammer Swing! 
by Jeff Torrington.
Secker, 416 pp., £8.99, August 1992, 0 436 53120 8
Show More
Looking for the Possible Dance 
by A.L. Kennedy.
Secker, 254 pp., £7.99, February 1993, 0 436 23321 5
Show More
The Lights Below 
by Carl MacDougall.
Secker, 254 pp., £7.99, February 1993, 9780436270796
Show More
Show More
... and no one wants to publish his novel; the doctor has him down as a malingerer; his wife and in-laws want him to be ‘sensible’, face up to his new responsibilities and take up a job in a banana warehouse; and a sinister doppelgänger appears to be on his trail, asking awkward questions. Worst of all, Tom has to witness the ‘dinging doon’ of the ...

Migne and Moody

Graham Robb, 4 August 1994

God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne 
by R. Howard Bloch.
Chicago, 162 pp., £19.95, June 1994, 0 226 05970 7
Show More
Show More
... had an answer. There was nothing wrong with the paintings: ‘Christ is rendered according to the laws of true perspective.’ What Migne’s life showed, over and over again, was that as soon as some ecclesiastical work is carried out more efficiently than usual it becomes a parody of itself. This applies to the saving of souls as much as to the fabrication ...

Why Rhino-Mounted Bantu Never Sacked Rome

Armand Marie Leroi, 4 September 1997

Guns, Germs and Steel 
by Jared Diamond.
Cape, 480 pp., £18.99, April 1997, 0 224 03809 5
Show More
Why is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality 
by Jared Diamond.
Weidenfeld, 176 pp., £11.99, July 1997, 0 297 81775 2
Show More
Show More
... seems marvellous, when all the countries surrounding Africa are so forward in comparison,’ John Speke, discoverer of the source of the White Nile, observed. Very much a man of his time, Speke was necessarily less aware than we are today of the diversity of African societies, their extraordinary artistic wealth, and the antiquity of their trade with the ...

Stone’s Socrates

Alan Ryan, 27 October 1988

The Trial of Socrates 
by I.F. Stone.
Cape, 282 pp., £12.95, September 1988, 0 224 02591 0
Show More
Show More
... government. The Republic puts the ideal city under the rule of the philosopher-king, and even the Laws. Plato’s final defence of the ‘second-best’, practicable city, envisages an ideological watchdog in the shape of the Nocturnal Council, staffed by a priesthood with powers of life and death over dissenters of all sorts. Stone is prone to hit Socrates ...
The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age 
by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Faber, 595 pp., £20, March 1984, 0 571 13177 8
Show More
Show More
... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...

The Gods of Greece

Jonathan Barnes, 4 July 1985

Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical 
by Walter Burkert, translated by John Raffan.
Blackwell, 493 pp., £29.50, April 1985, 0 631 11241 3
Show More
Show More
... himself lamented that most Greeks of his day were in one way or other fundamentally irreligious (Laws, 948C). Hence the enlightened vision of ancient Greece, in which the Greeks are seen as a singular race, undisturbed by religious terrors, uncorrupted by superstitious folly, their lives governed by human reason – or misgoverned by human passion. The gods ...

I am Gregor Samsa

Eric Korn, 7 January 1993

Virtual Reality 
by Howard Rheingold.
Secker, 415 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 436 41212 8
Show More
Cyberpunk 
by Katie Hafner and John Markoff.
Fourth Estate, 368 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 1 872180 94 9
Show More
Glimpses of Heaven, Visions of Hell: Virtual Reality and its Implications 
by Barrie Sherman and Phil Judkins.
Hodder, 224 pp., £12.99, July 1992, 0 340 56905 0
Show More
Show More
... an array) which responds to the commands of its operators (players, citizens) according to the laws of physics, economics or morality or according to alternative rules if the programmer prefers. The simplest example is the flight simulator, a device that began life as the Link trainer, an enclosed cockpit with stubby wings that dipped and pitched and ...
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust 
by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen.
Little, Brown, 622 pp., £20, March 1996, 0 316 87942 8
Show More
Show More
... that the 1933 purge of Jews in public employment was ‘wildly popular’, that the Nuremberg Laws were ‘very popular’ and that Germans’ reaction to Kristallnacht showed their ‘enthusiasm for the eliminationist enterprise’. Unsubtantiated assertions like these are repeated throughout the book. They are essential to the argument because he ...

The Real Founder of the Liberal Party

Jonathan Parry, 2 October 1997

Lord Melbourne 1779-1848 
by L.G. Mitchell.
Oxford, 349 pp., £25, May 1997, 0 19 820592 9
Show More
Show More
... philosophy. As a youth, Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on ...

A Few Heroic Men

Priya Satia: Naoroji’s Tactics, 9 September 2021

Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism 
by Dinyar Patel.
Harvard, 320 pp., £28.95, May 2020, 978 0 674 23820 6
Show More
Show More
... formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s rights activists and working-class representatives, sharing a platform with William Morris. He supported improving the lives of labouring Britons, while educating his audiences ...

E Bada!

Rye Dag Holmboe: What Isou Did to Language, 21 July 2022

Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou 
by Andrew Hussey.
Reaktion, 328 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 78914 492 5
Show More
Show More
... how to compose a Dadaist poem: cut out bits of newspaper, put them in a bag, shake it, allow the laws of chance to rearrange the words into a poem. But Isou wanted to take it further, breaking down the words themselves to produce such phoneme-masticating lines as ‘vagn bagadou kri kuss balala chimorabissss …’ If Dada, to use Isou’s ...

Flightiness

Marina Warner: Airborne Females, 30 August 2018

Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics and Other Airborne Females 
by Serinity Young.
Oxford, 432 pp., £19.99, May 2018, 978 0 19 530788 7
Show More
Show More
... and butterflies to realise Titania’s fairy attendants accurately and Victorian artists such as John Anster Fitzgerald also borrowed features from the insect world to make their fairylands convincing. Today, through the ingenuities of CGI, many of these hybrids now speak and weep, appearing convincingly embodied and entirely sentient. Entertainments, from ...

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