Search Results

Advanced Search

706 to 720 of 742 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
Show More
Show More
... reveres are mostly the fallen – Swift, Blake, Clare, Isaac Rosenberg, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Robert Desnos, Charles Péguy, Paul Celan, as well as people who are defined by their outsiderness, such as the young Berkeley and the mathematician Alan Turing – whose integrity is interwoven with their ruin. The poem is full of short studies of such ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... sounds very simple: put up shacks and hideaways in places so obvious that nobody will notice them. Robert Macfarlane, who lodged in a black hut assembled by urban explorers wearing orange hi-viz overalls during the fuss of the London Marathon, called his windowless shelter an ‘urban bothy’. The crew survey the territory as thoroughly as the developers with ...

How can we live with it?

Thomas Jones: How to Survive Climate Change, 23 May 2013

The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong – and How to Fix It 
by Dieter Helm.
Yale, 273 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 300 18659 8
Show More
Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering 
by Clive Hamilton.
Yale, 247 pp., £20, February 2013, 978 0 300 18667 3
Show More
The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live 
by Brian Stone.
Cambridge, 187 pp., £19.99, July 2012, 978 1 107 60258 8
Show More
Show More
... and greener-than-coal reputation of gas reducing or delaying incentives to develop genuinely green alternatives. But he shrugs them off, as lenient on them as he is unforgiving of the supposedly insurmountable difficulties with wind power. Other commentators (Bill McKibben is one) are less sanguine. And it is convenient, not to say suspicious, that Helm ...

A Common Assault

Alan Bennett: In Italy, 4 November 2004

... Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the peerless Rita’ (the ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
Show More
Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
Show More
Show More
... without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors.’ The twins were in the studio to work on a film called Freaks, made by Tod Browning, who had just directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of ...

That’s what Wystan says

Seamus Perry, 10 May 2018

Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography 
by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 912 pp., £27.95, May 2017, 978 0 691 17249 1
Show More
Show More
... addressed him hours Before he would have dared; the deaf girl too Seemed to expect him at the green chateau; The meal was laid, the guest room full of flowers.This lists a succession of quotidian things, at once banal and yet pregnant with meaning. The tone is studiedly neutral, like a case study, but the atmosphere is wholly magical, like a tale of ...

War is noise

Jonathan Raban: Letters from My Father, 17 December 2020

... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...

Magic Beans, Baby

David Runciman, 7 January 2021

A Promised Land 
by Barack Obama.
Viking, 768 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 241 49151 5
Show More
Show More
... who even managed his turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, on the night he green-lighted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. ‘Cool comedian and quiet commander,’ as Adam Gopnik described him then. The idea that his gifts could have taken him in many directions gives Obama a distinct sense of unease, the feeling that nothing is ...

Look at Don Juan

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World, 19 October 2023

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World 
by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom.
Chicago, 152 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 226 69495 5
Show More
Show More
... collaborators (which Camus supported) and the execution of fascist sympathisers such as the writer Robert Brasillach (which he opposed). With the start of the Cold War, the always precarious alliance between the communist and non-communist left was beginning to crumble. Camus was fretting, too, about his native Algeria, ‘pacified’ by the army after a ...

Diary

Gale Walden: David’s Presence, 2 November 2023

... capitalisation required. It was a serious thing, trying to be a writer. My ex-boyfriend, Robert, had just won a national book contest. When I first saw David, he was kneeling next to Robert’s chair, looking up at him. I thought he looked like a little bird waiting to be fed. But David noticed me in a different ...

The Divisions of Cyprus

Perry Anderson, 24 April 2008

... of the puzzlement felt on this score in London,’ records the leading scholar of the subject, Robert Holland: ‘It remains … a notable fact that it was the British who, in the first instance, had to screw the Turks up to a pitch of excitement about Cyprus, not the other way round.’1 When the requisite excitement eventually came, London did not flinch ...

While Statues Sleep

Thomas Laqueur, 18 June 2020

Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil 
by Susan Neiman.
Allen Lane, 415 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 241 26286 3
Show More
Show More
... the history of the Civil War right – whatever that might mean – or by tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee across the South. The 2400 miles of Route 66, America’s most famous highway, pass through only one state in the former Confederacy, Texas. Yet in 1936 the first edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book ...

Masters and Fools

T.J. Clark: Velázquez’s Distance, 23 September 2021

... losing face, being deep or superficial – get brought back weirdly to life.) The historian Robert Stradling pointed out some time ago that during the 44 years of Philip’s reign there was not a single day of peace; and most of the wars were far from being triumphs. This may be relevant.We might compare the lost face of Mars with that in another ...

Each rock has two names

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: In Nagorno-Karabakh, 17 June 2021

... she had forgotten for a moment that she was Armenian.We were sitting on a bench, facing the dark green waters of the Caspian. Marina scanned the scene: mothers pushing their children in buggies, teenagers posing for selfies and a few older Bakuvians power-walking along the promenade. ‘We have to forget and move on,’ she said. ‘Why do Armenians keep ...

In the Anti-World

Nicholas Jenkins: Raymond Roussel, 6 September 2001

Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams 
by Mark Ford.
Faber, 312 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 17409 4
Show More
Show More
... the world of objects – dust motes, bubbles, a cork, pencils, a piece of hotel notepaper, grapes, green beans, even the sight of a mildly inflamed uvula. (A distasteful glimpse into the depths of an infected mouth is the nearest that Roussel’s writing ever comes to entering the inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature ...

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