Search Results

Advanced Search

76 to 90 of 122 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Suckville

Emily Witt: Rachel Kushner, 2 August 2018

The Mars Room 
by Rachel Kushner.
Cape, 340 pp., £16.99, June 2018, 978 1 910702 67 3
Show More
Show More
... Protective Services group homes. Button Sanchez murdered a college student for no reason. Serenity Smith is a trans woman who gets transferred from the men’s unit, not without some resistance from a faction of gender bigots in Stanville. Betty LaFrance is a death-row inmate who hired a hit man to kill the hit man she hired to kill her husband. Candy Peña is ...

Under the Steinway

Jenny Diski: Marco Roth, 7 March 2013

The Scientists: A Family Romance 
by Marco Roth.
Union Books, 196 pp., £14.99, January 2013, 978 1 908526 19 9
Show More
Show More
... peak of the genre, Waterstone’s introduced a new section labelled ‘Painful Lives’ and W.H. Smith offered the category ‘Tragic Life Stories’. The passion for true-life unhappiness was partly responsible for fiction being seen as concealed autobiography. When I wrote a novel in 1989 narrated by an infant without a brain telling the story of its ...

Cauldrons for Helmets

Barbara Newman: Crusading Women, 13 April 2023

Women and the Crusades 
by Helen J. Nicholson.
Oxford, 287 pp., £25, February, 978 0 19 880672 1
Show More
Show More
... casualty rate was astonishing. Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
Show More
The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
Show More
Show More
... her 1991 American edition for the 1992 British edition. This version, with a Preface by Joan Smith, includes information regarding the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia. Marilyn French deals with Southern and Eastern countries, including the ‘Third World’ – a term which she thinks passé and dishonest. Both books are contemporary and ...

Terms of Art

Conor Gearty: Human Rights Law, 11 March 2010

The Law of Human Rights 
by Richard Clayton and Hugh Tomlinson.
Oxford, 2443 pp., £295, March 2009, 978 0 19 926357 8
Show More
Human Rights Law and Practice 
edited by Anthony Lester, David Pannick and Javan Herberg.
Lexis Nexis, 974 pp., £237, April 2009, 978 1 4057 3686 2
Show More
Human Rights: Judicial Protection in the United Kingdom 
by Jack Beatson, Stephen Grosz, Tom Hickman, Rabinder Singh and Stephanie Palmer.
Sweet and Maxwell, 905 pp., £124, September 2008, 978 0 421 90250 3
Show More
Show More
... go before the Supreme Court) the death from heatstroke in an Iraq military camp of Private Jason Smith in August 2003 was held – rightly – to be a matter for investigation by the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, into whose territory the body had been returned. Smith had had to endure shade temperatures in ...

A Piece of Single Blessedness

John Burrows, 21 January 1988

Jane Austen: Her Life 
by Park Honan.
Weidenfeld, 452 pp., £16.95, October 1987, 0 297 79217 2
Show More
Show More
... deficiencies. A second problem looks simple enough but can never be resolved. Why write a Life of Smith or Mrs Jones, and why should it be read? The Rousseauistic answer is that any life (especially mine, but even yours perhaps) is of interest if it can evoke a tear; and the reading public has been told, chiefly in autobiographies, how many a tender branch ...

Pious Girls and Swearing Fathers

Patricia Craig, 1 June 1989

English Children and their Magazines 1751-1945 
by Kirsten Drotner.
Yale, 272 pp., £16.95, January 1988, 0 300 04010 5
Show More
Frank Richards: The Chap behind the Chums 
by Mary Cadogan.
Viking, 258 pp., £14.95, October 1988, 0 670 81946 8
Show More
A History of Children’s Book Illustration 
by Joyce Irene Whalley and Tessa Rose Chester.
Murray/Victoria and Albert Museum, 268 pp., £35, April 1988, 0 7195 4584 6
Show More
Manchester Polytechnic Library of Children’s Books 1840-1939: ‘From Morality to Adventure’ 
by W.H. Shercliff.
Bracken Books/Studio Editions, 203 pp., £25, September 1988, 0 901276 18 9
Show More
Children’s Modern First Editions: Their Value to Collectors 
by Joseph Connolly.
Macdonald, 336 pp., £17.95, October 1988, 0 356 15741 5
Show More
Show More
... made for the Fifties Eagle, whose first issue is reproduced in colour. What else? Prettifiers like Anne Anderson and Honor Appleton get in, but not the more distinctive Gladys Peto; Robert Lawson is here but not Lawson Wood; A.E. Bestall (briefly) but not Thomas Henry. In compiling the book – which is, in fact, very nearly comprehensive – the authors have ...

Blights

Patricia Craig, 23 April 1987

A Darkness in the Eye 
by M.S. Power.
Heinemann, 212 pp., £10.95, April 1987, 0 434 59961 1
Show More
The Stars at Noon 
by Denis Johnson.
Faber, 181 pp., £9.95, March 1987, 0 571 14607 4
Show More
Like Birds in the Wilderness 
by Agnes Owens.
Fourth Estate, 138 pp., £9.95, March 1987, 0 947795 51 0
Show More
Fool’s Sanctuary 
by Jennifer Johnston.
Hamish Hamilton, 132 pp., £8.95, April 1987, 0 241 12035 7
Show More
A Fatal Inversion 
by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell).
Viking, 317 pp., £10.95, March 1987, 0 670 80977 2
Show More
Sisters of the Road 
by Barbara Wilson.
Women’s Press, 202 pp., £3.95, March 1987, 0 7043 4073 9
Show More
The price you pay 
by Hannah Wakefield.
Women’s Press, 245 pp., £4.95, March 1987, 0 7043 4072 0
Show More
Show More
... a subtler account of the making of a terrorist, you have to turn to a piece of fiction like Anne Devlin’s ‘Naming the names’.) Power sets up a proliferation of outlets for treachery and hostility. His characters, when they’re not expressing weariness, have a vicious and unengaging style of speech: ‘I say fuck you and your likes. You’re all ...

My word, Miss Perkins

Jenny Diski: In the Typing Pool, 4 August 2005

Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture 
edited by Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell.
Ashgate, 168 pp., £40, January 2005, 0 7546 3804 9
Show More
Show More
... apparently split themselves in two and do both. Just ten minutes ago I heard Alexander McCall Smith, a writer of feel-good detective novels, tell an interviewer how his work comes to him through his ‘unconscious’: plots, characters, everything bubbles up from the murky depths and tells him its story. He just types it out. Now this I envy. My ...

And Cabbages Too

Patrick Collinson: The Tudors, 22 March 2001

New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603 
by Susan Brigden.
Allen Lane, 434 pp., £20, September 2000, 0 7139 9067 8
Show More
Show More
... too, had a politics; and we are critical (although Susan Brigden apparently is not) of Sir Thomas Smith’s famous mid-Tudor put-down of ‘the fourth sort of men which do not rule’: ‘These have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth, and no account is made of them but only to be ruled, not to rule other’ – a remark which ...

Somewhat Divine

Simon Schaffer: Isaac Newton, 16 November 2000

Isaac Newton: The ‘Principia’ Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 
translated by I. Bernard Cohen.
California, 974 pp., £22, September 1999, 0 520 08817 4
Show More
Show More
... 1964 and the variorum edition eventually appeared from Harvard in 1971 with the invaluable aid of Anne Whitman, a fine classicist. In a 400-page introduction Cohen foresaw a re-edition of Motte’s translation and a commentary on Newton’s work, including an English rendition of those sections currently of most interest to scholars. These ...

Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
Show More
Show More
... separation from his wife. In August a letter Dickens had written to his friend and manager Arthur Smith, with permission to show it to anyone he chose, appeared in the New York Daily Tribune, making reference to the ‘mental disorder’ under which Catherine Dickens sometimes laboured. Not surprisingly, the legacies of 1858 included Wilkie Collins’s novel ...

Euro-Gramscism

Tom Nairn, 3 July 1980

Gramsci and Marxist Theory 
edited by Chantal Mouffe.
Routledge, 288 pp., £9.50, November 1979, 0 7100 0358 7
Show More
Gramsci and the State 
by Christine Buci-Glucksmann.
Lawrence and Wishart, 470 pp., £14, February 1980, 9780853154839
Show More
Gramsci’s Politics 
by Anne Showstack Sassoon.
Croom Helm, 261 pp., £12.95, April 1980, 9780709903260
Show More
Show More
... annotated Selections from the Prison Notebooks produced by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1971), a great deal of Gramsci has become available in first-rate translation. There are two further volumes of Political Writings, covering the whole period from 1910 up to his imprisonment in 1926: and two editions of the Letters from Prison by Hamish ...

A Little Pickle for the Husband

Michael Mason, 1 April 1999

Beeton's Book of Household Management 
by Isabella Beeton.
Southover, 1112 pp., £29.95, November 1998, 9781870962155
Show More
Show More
... When the modern reader makes the transition from merely dreaming along with Jane Grigson or Delia Smith to trying a recipe, the imperatives resume their familiar role. But this cannot have been the case with a book such as Household Management, or not for much of the time. How did the following sentence function? ‘Send [the pancakes] to table, and continue ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Fresh Revelations, 20 October 1994

... not 16. Anyone in any doubt should have compared the speech by the civilised and courageous Chris Smith with that of the bigot Tony Marlowe. ‘Predatory’ is a word much in evidence, the frail faltering flame of heterosexuality always in danger of being snuffed out by the hot homosexual wind. 1 March. It seems pretty well accepted now that much of one’s ...

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