Search Results

Advanced Search

106 to 120 of 233 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Bordragings

John Kerrigan: Scotland’s Erasure, 10 October 2024

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland 
by Lorna Hutson.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 1 009 25357 4
Show More
Show More
... According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most northern islands great and small, and so compassing about ...

Johnson’s Business

Keith Walker, 7 August 1980

A Dictionary of the English Language 
by Samuel Johnson.
Times, 2558 pp., £45, June 1980, 0 7230 0228 2
Show More
Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years 
by James Clifford.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £10, February 1980, 0 434 13805 3
Show More
Show More
... experience. Such endeavours include Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), a work which Johnson drew on for the Dictionary, the French Encyclopédie, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776), and the more specialised works studied by Lawrence Lipking in his important book, The Ordering of the Arts in 18th-Century England – Charles Burney’s History of ...

Real Absences

Barbara Johnson, 19 October 1995

Post Scripts: The Writer’s Workshop 
by Vincent Kaufmann, translated by Deborah Treisman.
Harvard, 199 pp., £31.95, June 1994, 0 674 69330 2
Show More
The Oxford Book of Letters 
edited by Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode.
Oxford, 559 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 19 214188 0
Show More
Show More
... to the work of a wide variety of literary theorists in the Seventies, many of whom, like Kaufmann, drew their inspiration from the work of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Proust, Rilke, Artaud and Kafka. The exploration of the text’s non-referential dimensions, its rhetorical self-consumption, was at the heart of the theoretical revolution. But many of the ...

Fear the fairies

John Gallagher: Early Modern Sleepe, 18 May 2017

Sleep in Early Modern England 
by Sasha Handley.
Yale, 280 pp., £25, August 2016, 978 0 300 22039 1
Show More
Show More
... confessional allegiance: Thomas Ken’s ‘White Paternoster’, a prayer to be said before bed, drew on a Catholic model but pruned it of saints, even though the bedchamber remained a place where Catholics and dissenters could follow their own practices in seclusion. Bedtime prayer was a necessary precaution in case of sudden death during the night, and ...

Their Way

Jose Harris: On the Origin of Altruism, 12 March 2009

The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain 
by Thomas Dixon.
British Academy, 420 pp., £60, May 2008, 978 0 19 726426 3
Show More
Show More
... and Europe before, during and after the Second World War has suggested that those movements drew their direct inspiration at least as much from the ‘positivist’ legacy of Comte (and his mentor Saint-Simon) as from the more obvious influences of either democratic socialism or Soviet-style Marxism. Some of the most prominent social planners of those ...

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
... Danish master Jørn Utzon; the inside by a confused committee, or, as the Australian critic Philip Drew sourly calls them, ‘a conspiracy of nobodies’. It is a bittersweet story, and one that goes far to explain why most modern architecture is so awful. Like Sydney, the Opera House was a British idea. Sir Eugene Goossens, the violinist and composer, arrived ...

Some Names for Robert Lowell

Karl Miller, 19 May 1983

Robert Lowell: A Biography 
by Ian Hamilton.
Faber, 527 pp., £12.50, May 1983, 0 571 13045 3
Show More
Show More
... where he ran amok, insulting generals and riding the equestrian statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put ...

The Importance of Aunts

Colm Tóibín, 17 March 2011

... left for that purpose. There is a mother in Pride and Prejudice, but there are also two aunts: Elizabeth Bennet’s Aunt Gardiner and Mr Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It is an aspect of Austen’s genius that, while the novel negates the power and influence of Elizabeth’s mother, neutralises her by being ...

Rising above it

Russell Davies, 2 December 1982

The Noel Coward Diaries 
edited by Graham Payn and Sheridan Morley.
Weidenfeld, 698 pp., £15, September 1982, 0 297 78142 1
Show More
Show More
... Kirk; here are the Nicholses, Beverley and Mike; and you must distinguish, if you will, between Elizabeth Taylors one (actress), two (novelist) and three (friend of Gladys Calthrop). Wilde, Wilder and Wilding mark the beginning of the end; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor make 22 appearances: and in a trickle of Zanucks, Zinkeisens and Zolotows, the torrent ...

Gobblebook

Rosemary Hill: Unhappy Ever After, 21 June 2018

In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter 
by Miranda Seymour.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 1 4711 3857 7
Show More
Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist 
by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice.
Bodleian, 128 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 85124 488 1
Show More
Show More
... she saw a man whom she might save from his own flaws. If Byron was no Darcy, Annabella was no Elizabeth Bennet. In their courtship she was more of a Catherine Morland, naively in thrall to a fictional worldview and unable to see beyond it. If there was a literary parallel for the tortuous manipulations that surrounded the marriage it was Les Liaisons ...

Hunter-Capitalists

Roger Hodge: The Comanches, 15 December 2011

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanche Tribe 
by S.C. Gwynne.
Constable, 483 pp., £9.99, July 2011, 978 1 84901 703 9
Show More
Show More
... Parker was raped and stabbed but survived. Taken captive along with Rachel and her son James were Elizabeth Kellog and Silas Parker’s children John and Cynthia Ann. John grew up to be a Comanche warrior, perhaps ending his life as a rancher in Mexico; Elizabeth was ransomed; Cynthia Ann became the wife of the war leader ...

Use Use Use

Robert Baird: Robert Duncan’s Dream, 24 October 2013

Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus 
by Lisa Jarnot.
California, 509 pp., £27.95, August 2013, 978 0 520 23416 1
Show More
Show More
... as a gay man and rejected Macdonald’s advice to publish under a pseudonym. His admission drew much attention, and caused John Crowe Ransom to retract his acceptance of one of Duncan’s poems for the Kenyon Review. The essay was also notable for its earnest protest against the ‘cult of homosexual superiority’, a volley probably directed at the ...

To the Great God Pan

Laura Jacobs: Goddess Isadora, 24 October 2013

My Life: The Restored Edition 
by Isadora Duncan.
Norton, 322 pp., £12.99, June 2013, 978 0 87140 318 6
Show More
Show More
... and temples, to give it a fresh start, a place of dignity in the pantheon of high art. She drew stylistic guidance for her new language of movement from stillness: the iconic figures circling Grecian urns, the zephyrs and graces in Botticelli, the volumetric musculatures in drawings by Blake. She pulled meaning out of repose – ‘what she gives us is ...

Too Much

Barbara Taylor: A history of masturbation, 6 May 2004

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Zone, 501 pp., £21.95, March 2003, 1 890951 32 3
Show More
Show More
... in paradox, with both disputants adopting positions contrary to their convictions. Evelyn’s text drew on a stock repertoire of arguments against solitude, including solemn warnings against the low appetites it unleashed. ‘He ought to be a wise and good man indeed that dares trust himself alone: for Ambition and Malice, Lust and Superstition are in ...

‘There is a woman behind this!’

Peter Clarke: Schumpeter, 19 July 2007

Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction 
by Thomas K. McCraw.
Harvard, 719 pp., £22.95, May 2007, 978 0 674 02523 3
Show More
Show More
... made the most of his circumstances (which were rarely quite as grand as he made out). When he once drew up a list of seven distractions that had prevented him from accomplishing more work, ‘money (business)’ was in seventh place, just below ‘travel’ in sixth. In ascending order, ‘politics (public career)’ came next (he had briefly been state ...

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