Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 343 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Break your bleedin’ heart

Michael Wood: Proust’s Otherness, 4 January 2024

Swann’s Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by James Grieve.
NYRB, 450 pp., £16.99, June, 978 1 68137 629 5
Show More
The Swann Way 
by Marcel Proust, translated by Brian Nelson.
Oxford, 430 pp., £9.99, September, 978 0 19 887152 1
Show More
Show More
... as a kind of prelude to his own sentimental education, the story of a love affair, that of Charles Swann and Odette de Crécy, which took place around the time of his birth. He then picks up his own later life in Paris, and his desperate, teenage passion for Swann and Odette’s daughter (when the love affair ended, they felt it was time to get ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, 30 November 2017

Murder on the Orient Express 
directed by Kenneth Brannagh.
Show More
Show More
... print into plays and films almost since he was born in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920. Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, José Ferrer, Tony Randall and many others have brought him to some sort of audio or audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Les Diaboliques’, 3 March 2011

Les Diaboliques 
directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.
Show More
Show More
... turn safely to the detective who now makes his appearance. This is a retired policeman played by Charles Vanel, and said to be the model for Peter Falk’s Columbo: he smokes a small cigar perpetually, pretends not to understand half of what he hears, and has a habit of popping up magically everywhere. He wears a dark old woollen coat, though, instead of the ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Ghost Writer’, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, 22 April 2010

The Ghost Writer 
directed by Roman Polanski.
Show More
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 
directed by Niels Arden Oplev.
Show More
Show More
... who also shot Polanski’s The Pianist, as well as Taylor Hackford’s glossy biography of Ray Charles. This is important, because the movie is mostly about the way it looks. It’s meant to be a political thriller – based on Robert Harris’s novel The Ghost (the film has that title in the UK) – but it feels as if the writer went home halfway ...

Diary

Waldemar Januszczak: Charles Saatchi’s New Museum, 21 March 1985

... Having had much cause to mention Charles Saatchi in my Guardian column over the past five years, I was pleased when this most secretive of men finally agreed to meet me around the time of the opening of his new private museum. I found, more to other people’s surprise than my own, that he was a nice enough chap, a Guardian reader no less ...

At the Barbican

Rosemary Hill: The Eclecticism of the Eameses, 3 December 2015

... most people, who have never thought of making a moral distinction between toys and scale models, Charles Eames’s schoolmasterly voiceover at the beginning of Toccata for Toy Trains (1957), sets off a chain of ideas. Real toys, model toys, toy toys, toy models, real models, each a slightly different concept, reverberate in the mind like one of ...

Panel Problems

Anna McGee, 5 January 2023

... Florentine church of San Pier Maggiore was bought by the National Gallery in 1857, the director, Charles Eastlake, didn’t really know what to do with it. The altarpiece, painted by Jacopo di Cione and his workshop in the early 1370s, is one of the biggest made in the 14th century and, even though it had been dismantled after the church was destroyed in the ...

Charmed Quarantine

James Wood, 21 March 1996

Soul Says: On Recent Poetry 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 266 pp., £15.95, June 1995, 0 674 82146 7
Show More
The Breaking of Style: Hopkins, Heaney, Graham 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 100 pp., £18.95, January 1996, 0 674 08121 8
Show More
The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition 
by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 137 pp., £7.99, April 1995, 0 571 17078 1
Show More
Show More
... of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘True Grit’, 3 February 2011

True Grit 
directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.
Show More
Show More
... was always the thing. The mode kept remembering what it was ostensibly getting rid of. Charles Portis’s funny and violent novel True Grit (1968) is the perfect pastoral of the ungallant west. It presents a world mockingly simplified to its extreme elements, as if the western’s dream of a time before the law brought order and civilisation to a ...

A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways

Anne Carson, 8 November 2012

... Brecht, where ten years of exile have left their mark, and beneath 5 copies of file 100-190707, Charles Laughton returning to the stage as Galileo, enters an elevator. On the other hand, of my name with a hyphen between Eugene and Friedrich the Bureau has no record. Nay rather, like the name of a certain Frenchman to whom ...

Fear among the Teacups

Dinah Birch: Ellen Wood, 8 February 2001

East Lynne 
by Ellen Wood, edited by Andrew Maunder.
Broadview, 779 pp., £7.95, October 2000, 1 55111 234 5
Show More
Show More
... Andrew Maunder’s introduction to his new edition of Ellen Wood’s chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations ...

Do you want the allegory?

Charles Hope, 17 March 1983

Piero della Francesca’s ‘Baptism of Christ’ 
by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.
Yale, 182 pp., £19.50, January 1982, 0 300 02619 6
Show More
Indagini su Piero 
by Carlo Ginzburg.
Einaudi, 110 pp.
Show More
Gentile da Fabriano 
by Keith Christiansen.
Chatto, 193 pp., £35, June 1982, 0 7011 2468 7
Show More
Show More
... scenes. Thus both artists depicted the Queen of Sheba kneeling in recognition before the wood from which the True Cross would be made, but Piero added her subsequent meeting with Solomon, and he alone showed Constantine’s dream and his victory over Maxentius. Ginzburg thinks that the inclusion of these episodes implies a change of plan on the part ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Dictator’, 7 June 2012

The Dictator 
directed by Larry Charles.
Show More
Show More
... corruption. This line of thought actually recurs, I’m sure without any allusive intent, in Larry Charles’s The Dictator, starring Sacha Baron Cohen as the evil Oriental Admiral General Aladeen. An eager American dissident says the police in her country are fascists. ‘Yes,’ our hero says, ‘but not in a good way.’ Still, in spite of the echo, there ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Irishman’, 5 December 2019

... legs to be broken), and released early because of his health. He told his story to his lawyer, Charles Brandt, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, I Heard You Paint Houses (2004). The phrase is supposed to have been among the first words Hoffa said to Sheeran when they met on the phone. Formally the film is Sheeran’s autobiography. He speaks ...

Staunch with Sugar

Malcolm Gaskill: Early Modern Mishaps, 7 September 2017

Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650-1750 
by Craig Spence.
Boydell, 273 pp., £65, November 2016, 978 1 78327 135 1
Show More
Show More
... On 15 August​ 1737 Samuel Wood was working in a windmill on the Isle of Dogs, when a rope tied around his wrist became caught in the gear wheels. The gigantic brake-wheel pulled him into the mechanism, tearing off his right arm. Wood staggered a short distance before collapsing ...

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