Search Results

Advanced Search

91 to 105 of 333 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... Ireland hangs in the balance at Drumcree the Observer gives it one small paragraph on the front page, the rest all to do with the lobbying scandal the Observer is so proud of having unearthed. It’s only after nine whole pages to do with the paper’s ‘exclusive’ that it manages to get its head out of its own arse to start talking about Northern ...

Cold Sweat

Alan Bennett, 15 October 1981

Forms of Talk 
by Erving Goffman.
Blackwell, 335 pp., £12, September 1981, 0 631 12788 7
Show More
Show More
... of crime and the dustbins of showbiz. It’s this (and the look of so many quotations on the page) that makes his work initially inviting and accessible to a general reader like me. He writes with grace and wit and raises the odd eyebrow at those in his profession who don’t, though he can’t be too censorious of jargon, having invented a lot ...

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

... have acquired a more general interest as history has become more popular both on the page and on the screen. The doyen of TV historians, Simon Schama, is in a league of his own and his political viewpoint not in the forefront, but the new breed of historian – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs ...

Diary

David Runciman: Dylan on the radio, 19 July 2007

... man, poor man’, he told us about an email he’d received from, as he put it, ‘someone named Alan Dershowitz, who describes himself as a feisty civil libertarian from Harvard Law School’ (it’s hard to convey on the page the exquisite irony with which he spoke these words). ...

‘Très vrai!’

Leah Price, 18 October 2001

Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books 
by H.J. Jackson.
Yale, 324 pp., £19.95, April 2001, 0 300 08816 7
Show More
Show More
... quarantined each successive reader from any trace of grubby-handed predecessors. Remote-control page-turning mechanisms now allow users of the British Library to read rare books under glass: like safe sex, responsible reading has become disembodied. This might have pleased the late Victorian contributors to the Lancet who campaigned for library books to be ...

Imbalance

Michael Hofmann: The Charm of Hugo Williams, 22 May 2003

Collected Poems 
by Hugo Williams.
Faber, 288 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 571 21233 6
Show More
Show More
... Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come. (So English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed ...

Boiling Electrons

David Kaiser, 27 September 2012

Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe 
by George Dyson.
Allen Lane, 401 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 0 7139 9750 7
Show More
Show More
... I’d kept by me as a student. The familiarity of the contents jarred with the table’s front page. Only 31 copies of the table had been printed, the recipients listed on the cover. The table, dated 24 June 1947, had been prepared to accompany a classified report. The distribution lists for the two documents were a close match; nearly everyone who was ...

Seriously ugly

Gabriele Annan, 11 January 1990

Weep no more 
by Barbara Skelton.
Hamish Hamilton, 166 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 241 12200 7
Show More
Show More
... and some people will be relieved to hear, final – volume of her riotous autobiography’. On page one of volume one there is a quotation from Harriette Wilson about the meaning of the term ‘gentleman’ – a subject not really very close to Skelton’s heart. For an English autobiographer, she seems wonderfully free from snobbery, whether plain or ...

Matters of Taste

Peter Graham, 4 December 1986

On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen 
by Harold McGee.
Allen and Unwin, 684 pp., £20, September 1986, 9780043060032
Show More
The French Menu Cookbook 
by Richard Olney.
Dorling Kindersley, 294 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 86318 181 3
Show More
Out to Lunch 
by Paul Levy.
Chatto, 240 pp., £10.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3091 1
Show More
The Good Food Guide 1987 
edited by Drew Smith.
Consumers’ Association/Hodder, 725 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 340 39600 8
Show More
Show More
... many things that we thirst for more and more facts and explanations. He gives a fascinating eight-page account of various scientific investigations into the mysterious behaviour of sauce béarnaise (an emulsion of vinegar, egg yolks and butter), but says not a word about that even more mysterious and tricky sauce, beurre blanc (just vinegar, water and ...

Short Cuts

Christian Lorentzen: Fact-checking, 5 April 2012

... Luce’s taste for ‘relentless “departmental” organisation’, according to his biographer Alan Brinkley. Time was first to be called Facts, and its research department ‘was the only non-clerical area of the magazine to hire women … and for many years it hired only women.’ An editor wrote the young ladies a cheering memo: Checking is ...

At the Fitzwilliam

Eleanor Birne: Artists’ Mannequins, 8 January 2015

... slotted into place, hides the signature). It was delivered to von der Embde along with a three-page instruction booklet. This included advice on how to mount the mannequin on its stand and pin its arms and thighs into place. Detailed instructions on how to make it pose like the Venus de’ Medici were given, along with a recommendation to comb the ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Andy Warhol at MoMA, 12 October 1989

... to betray no sign of excitement, engagement or curiosity. Could this impersonator be the renowned Alan Midgette, who in 1967 ‘stood in’ for Andy at the University of Utah, of all places, and had the students demanding their thousand-dollar fee back? Warhol’s hope had been, ‘Maybe they’ll like him better than me,’ but surely there was some faint ...

Diary

Wendy Lesser: On O.J. Simpson, 21 July 1994

... this shining example of legal virtue, O.J. has subsequently added the services of F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz and even Dershowit’s brother Nathan. No one I know had ever heard of Nathan before; Alan Dershowitz is famous as the lawyer portrayed in Reversal of Fortune, the movie version of the Claus von Bülow ...

Tolkien’s Spell

Peter Godman, 21 July 1983

The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays 
by J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Christopher Tolkien .
Allen and Unwin, 240 pp., £9.95, March 1983, 0 04 809019 0
Show More
The Road to Middle-Earth 
by T.A. Shippey.
Allen and Unwin, 252 pp., £9.95, September 1982, 0 04 809018 2
Show More
Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode 
 by J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Alan Bliss.
Allen and Unwin, 180 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 04 829003 3
Show More
Show More
... creativity and explains the secrets of his appeal in a way unmatched by any other critic’. Alan Bliss’s purpose is more modest. Twenty years ago he had the idea of publishing a paper on the Anglo-Saxon story of Finn and Hengest. Discovering that nearly all his conclusions had been anticipated in lectures by Tolkien (the diffident words are ...

Diary

Colin Richmond: Love of Killing, 13 February 1992

... The impact which the newsreel films of Belsen made at the end of the war was enormous,’ Alan Borg, the Director-General of the Imperial War Museum writes in his foreword to The Relief of Belsen,1 a collection of eye-witness accounts. ‘Many still remember exactly where and when they first saw these awful images ...

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