Search Results

91 to 15 of 283 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Balls and Strikes

Charles Reeve: Clement Greenberg, 5 April 2007

Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg 
by Alice Goldfarb Marquis.
Lund Humphries, 321 pp., £25, April 2006, 0 85331 940 5
Show More
Show More
... Enrico Donati’s small painting White to White features an aggressively encrusted pale rectangle with a second rectangle – black, white and brown – in its top left corner. Dated 1953, fairly early for such deliberately coarse abstraction, the painting landed in the collection of the famously plain-spoken art critic Clement Greenberg ...

Corbyn in the Media

Paul Myerscough, 22 October 2015

... the job as leader of the Labour Party and already he wasn’t doing it right. What colour poppy, white or red, would he wear to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day? Would he kneel to the queen when he was admitted to the Privy Council (see Martin Loughlin’s piece on p. 29)? On the day after he was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his ...

Fog has no memory

Jonathan Meades: Postwar Colour(lessness), 19 July 2018

The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain 
by Lynda Nead.
Yale, 416 pp., £35, October 2017, 978 0 300 21460 4
Show More
Show More
... played in the establishment of BBC television’s reportorial and documentary conventions. Kenneth Allsop, Fyfe Robertson, James Cameron, Trevor Philpot, Robert Kee and Slim Hewitt (‘the scourge of Nuneaton’), all worked for it. The roles of writer, photographer and even picture editor often overlapped. ‘Memories of the late 1940s and 1950s are ...

Even If You Have to Starve

Ian Penman: Mod v. Trad, 29 August 2013

Mod: A Very British Style 
by Richard Weight.
Bodley Head, 478 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 224 07391 2
Show More
Show More
... In a lovely 1963 piece on Miles Davis, Kenneth Tynan quoted Cocteau to illuminate the art of his ‘discreet, elliptical’ subject: Davis was one of those 20th-century artists who had found ‘a simple way of saying very complicated things’. Jump to 1966 and the meatier, beatier sound of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring ...

At the Centre Pompidou

Jeremy Harding: Beat Generation, 8 September 2016

... of City Lights bookstore, and publisher of City Lights editions, gave him a warm welcome; Kenneth Rexroth, older by twenty years than Ginsberg and the New York crew, was briefly a mentor. The poet Gregory Corso came out west and joined Ginsberg. Neal Cassady, the movement’s mascot/muse, whom Ginsberg and Kerouac had met in the 1940s in New York ...

Short Cuts

Amjad Iraqi: Anti-BDS Law, 19 July 2018

... by Supreme Court jurisprudence that dates back to 1982, when the court ruled that a boycott of white-owned businesses in Mississippi led by the NAACP was a non-violent act that legitimately sought to bring about ‘political, social and economic change’. Many of the new laws against BDS are therefore clearly unconstitutional. The ACLU is currently suing ...

On the Sofa

Thomas Jones: ‘Wild Isles’, 4 May 2023

... The model for Life on Earth – thirteen hour-long episodes telling the story of evolution – was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), which Attenborough had commissioned as controller of BBC2. Other programmes he brought to the channel included The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and (making the most of the new colour technology) the ...

At the Whisky Bond

Dani Garavelli: The Alasdair Gray Archive, 17 April 2025

... used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively,’ he says, when his friend Kenneth McAlpin wonders why no one ever notices Glasgow’s magnificence.The spot by the second pylon was on Gray’s regular beat. In the 1960s, he lived close to the Glasgow School of Art, where he trained in stained glass and mural-making, and he often walked ...

Snarly Glitters

August Kleinzahler: Roy Fisher, 20 April 2006

The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2005 
by Roy Fisher.
Bloodaxe, 400 pp., £12, June 2005, 1 85224 701 0
Show More
Show More
... more to him than poetry. Fisher likes no jazz pianist more than Joe Sullivan, the rumbustious white Chicago artist who came up in the 1920s with Eddie Condon’s band. Like Fisher, Sullivan was an unabashed disciple of the Earl Hines style of playing, with that busily inventive left hand and the right hand playing octaves: The pianist Joe ...

Dead but Not Quite Buried

Charles van Onselen: The desecration industry in South Africa, 29 October 1998

... Transvaal to observe and report on the plight of black families who had been thrown off white farms. These evictions were prompted by the passage of the notorious Natives’ Land Act, the legislation which, like the Enclosure Acts, formed the bedrock on which the economic edifice of segregationist, and later apartheid, South Africa was ...

Mrs Straus’s Devotion

Jenny Diski, 5 June 1997

Last Dinner on the ‘Titanic’: Menus and Recipes from the Great Liner 
by Rick Archbold and Dana McCauley.
Weidenfeld, 128 pp., £9.99, April 1997, 1 86448 250 8
Show More
The ‘Titanic’ Complex 
by John Wilson Foster.
Belcouver, 92 pp., £5.99, April 1997, 0 9699464 1 4
Show More
Down with the Old Canoe 
by Steven Biel.
Norton, 300 pp., £18.95, April 1997, 9780393039658
Show More
Show More
... whose food and service were superior even to the first-class dining-room, was not part of the White Star liner’s inclusive price. Passengers who took their meals there instead of the first-class saloon, paid at the time for what they ate, though they were entitled to apply for a rebate at the end of the voyage. After the sinking of the Titanic, several ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
Show More
The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
Show More
The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
Show More
Show More
... though it was the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew sheepdog hair and Bakunin beards, and adopted the statutory exotic guru, but they never really had anything like the Stones’ sullen, dandified grandeur. The Stones were ...

Daisy packs her bags

Zachary Leader: The Road to West Egg, 21 September 2000

Trimalchio: An Early Version of ‘The Great Gatsby’ 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III.
Cambridge, 192 pp., £30, April 2000, 0 521 40237 9
Show More
Show More
... standing as well as commercial success, was complicated. In 1922 Fitzgerald took himself off to White Bear Lake in Minnesota, near his home city of St Paul, and in June of that year, while correcting proofs for Tales of the Jazz Age, began work on ‘something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned’. This work, a ...

Weird Things in the Sky

Edmund Gordon: Are we alone?, 26 December 2024

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon 
by Greg Eghigian.
Oxford, 388 pp., £22.99, September 2024, 978 0 19 086987 8
Show More
Show More
... what appeared to be ski pants. He had soft, unblemished skin, long, flowing hair and sparkling white teeth. Communicating telepathically, he explained that his name was Orthon, that he came from Venus, and that he was on Earth to warn mankind that the testing and use of atomic bombs was putting the entire galaxy in danger. ‘The beauty of his form ...

Don’t Move

Jeremy Noel-Tod: Fictional re-creations of Vermeer, 9 August 2001

Girl with a Pearl Earring 
by Tracy Chevalier.
HarperCollins, 248 pp., £5.99, July 2000, 0 00 651320 4
Show More
Girl in Hyacinth Blue 
by Susan Vreeland.
Review, 242 pp., £6.99, May 2001, 9780747266594
Show More
A View of Delft: Vermeer Then and Now 
by Anthony Bailey.
Chatto, 288 pp., £16.99, April 2001, 0 7011 6913 3
Show More
Vermeer’s Camera 
by Philip Steadman.
Oxford, 207 pp., £17.99, February 2001, 0 19 215967 4
Show More
Show More
... out has suggested a temperamental aversion to busy or obvious art. The visual silence of the white wall behind Woman with a Pearl Necklace, where originally there was a map, is an arresting compositional decision: the golden woman’s gaze, and the mirror’s reflection, meet invisibly in the great patch of pale light spreading from the window towards ...

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