Search Results

Advanced Search

901 to 915 of 929 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
... will soon become so. Hill was very taken by the American editor who explained the description of King Offa as ‘overlord of the M5’ in Mercian Hymns as referring to a branch of the British secret service rather than the motorway system. Such contingent stuff enters his poetry with a mordant mischief, as though advertising its transience, a spirit that has ...

Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
Show More
Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
Show More
Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
Show More
Show More
... use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of evil in childhood, The Night of the Hunter. He died in 1955, of a heart attack, aged 45, leaving behind several manuscript chapters of an autobiographical novel, A ...

In the Tart Shop

Murray Sayle: How Sydney got its Opera House, 5 October 2000

The Masterpiece: Jørn Utzon, a Secret Life 
by Philip Drew.
Hardie Grant, 574 pp., AUS $39.95, October 1999, 1 86498 047 8
Show More
Jørn Utzon: The Sydney Opera House 
by Françoise Fromonot, translated by Christopher Thompson.
Electa/Gingko, 236 pp., £37.45, January 1998, 3 927258 72 5
Show More
Show More
... in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to know about Our Bridge. It’s a solid job; it almost bankrupted its British ...

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

... Murdoch novel (as she herself batted around Oxford, gown flying). There is a bicycle silhouette by Charles Mozley on the spine of the dust jacket for The Sandcastle. English schoolmasters, in the sad twilight, disappointed and damply lustful, trundle over gravel to reach ‘the smooth tarmac surface of the arterial road’. Wicker basket. Tweed jacket. Bicycle ...

Tickle and Flutter

Terry Castle: Maude Hutchins’s Revenge, 3 July 2008

... a hair-raising frolic indeed: Bobsy was president of the Arts Club of Chicago and her husband, Charles Barnett Goodspeed, the trustee in question, a prominent Chicago businessman related to one of the founders of the university, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed. Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 ...

Oh, you clever people!

Tom Crewe: The Unrelenting Bensons, 20 April 2017

A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain 
by Simon Goldhill.
Chicago, 337 pp., £24.50, October 2016, 978 0 226 39378 0
Show More
Show More
... know how … his fear of waste was so strong.’ In this Edward was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian ...

Customising Biography

Iain Sinclair, 22 February 1996

Blake 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 399 pp., £20, September 1995, 1 85619 278 4
Show More
Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol I: Jerusalem 
editor David Bindman, edited by Morton D. Paley.
Tate Gallery, 304 pp., £48, August 1991, 1 85437 066 9
Show More
Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. II: Songs of Innocence and Experience 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Andrew Lincoln.
Tate Gallery, 210 pp., £39.50, August 1991, 1 85437 068 5
Show More
Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol III: The Early Illuminated Books 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Morris Eaves, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 288 pp., £48, August 1993, 1 85437 119 3
Show More
Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. IV: The Continental Prophecies: America, Europe, The Song of Los 
editor David Bindman, edited by D.W. Dörbecker.
Tate Gallery, 368 pp., £50, May 1995, 1 85437 154 1
Show More
Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. V: Milton, a Poem 
series editor David Bindman, edited by Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi.
Tate Gallery, 224 pp., £48, November 1993, 1 85437 121 5
Show More
Collected Edition of William Blake’s Illuminated Books: Vol. VI: The Urizen Books 
 editor David Bindman, edited by David Worrall.
Tate Gallery, 232 pp., £39.50, May 1995, 9781854371553
Show More
Show More
... through the waxworks of English history. Ackroyd’s early mentor J.H. Prynne, in a lecture on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, speaks of ‘that extraordinary poem where Blake decides to rework Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton.’ ‘There are,’ he continues, ‘congestions of personality which result from that ...

Isn’t that . . . female?

Patricia Lockwood: My Dame Antonia, 20 June 2024

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories 
by A.S. Byatt.
Vintage, 444 pp., £9.99, November 2023, 978 1 5291 1299 3
Show More
Show More
... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...

Wobble in My Mind

Colm Tóibín: Lizzie, Cal and Caroline, 7 May 2020

The Dolphin Letters, 1970-79: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle 
edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 560 pp., £35, January, 978 0 571 35741 3
Show More
The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-73 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton.
Farrar, Straus, 224 pp., £11.99, December 2019, 978 0 374 53827 9
Show More
Show More
... She wrote a letter of complaint to Robert Giroux, Lowell’s New York publisher, copying in Charles Monteith at Faber:I am deeply distressed that both of you would have seen this book through to publication without asking my permission for the prodigal use of my letters, for the use in the most intimate way of my name and that of my daughter … I know ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... saw libertarian economists such as James Buchanan, acting in concert with the right-wing zealot Charles Koch and lobbyists for corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank and General Motors, disseminating radical ideas through a pliable media and a new curriculum for economics education in universities. Partly as a result of their ...

Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
Show More
Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
Show More
Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
Show More
Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
Show More
A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
Show More
Show More
... is damned after hearing a livid sermon that could have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy; yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. There is a sense ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
Show More
Show More
... as is suggested by the above-cited cases of Mary Toft (1703-63, ‘the rabbit-breeder’) and Sir Charles Isham (1819-1903, ‘rural improver and gardener’). The ODNB’s greater inclusiveness is one of the ways it differs not just from its predecessor but also from Who’s Who, often regarded in the 20th century as the ante-chamber to the DNB. In that ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
Show More
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
Show More
Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
Show More
Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
Show More
Show More
... while those with reservations, including the Popular Front critic F.O. Matthiessen and the poet Charles Olson, preferred to align him with Shakespeare, his revolutionary Miltonic essence giving way to a more properly tragic register, with its evocations of madness and fallibility (Lear is Olson’s big parallel) and over-reaching. This was, in a sense, to ...
... were mostly old, and the Irish Parliamentary Party had never fully recovered from the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell. (Parnell, first elected to the House of Commons in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having ...

The Monster in the Milk Bowl

Richard Poirier, 3 October 1996

Pierre, or The Ambiguities 
by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker.
HarperCollins, 449 pp., £15.99, May 1996, 0 06 118009 2
Show More
Show More
... significant that Melville makes a point of mentioning it. These two earlier illicit lovers betray King Arthur doubly, as both husband and ruler. So do Francesca and Paolo betray Giovanni Malatesta, since he is husband to the one and elder brother to the other. It is their exposure to an actual text of the Lancelot-Guenevere story that induces, according to ...

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