Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 96 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Nolanus Nullanus

Charles Nicholl, 12 March 1992

Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair 
by John Bossy.
Yale, 294 pp., £16.95, September 1991, 0 300 04993 5
Show More
The Elizabethan Secret Service 
by Alison Plowden.
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 158 pp., £30, September 1991, 0 7108 1152 7
Show More
The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe 
by Victor Thoren.
Cambridge, 523 pp., £40, May 1991, 0 521 35158 8
Show More
Show More
... Bruno quite well. He too was an habitué of the French Embassy, in which he served for a while as priest and confessor. He was also a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, supplying him with a steady stream of intelligence from within the Catholic enclave of the Embassy. His letters and reports, written in French, remain among the State Papers at the Public Record ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: The Salman Rushdie Acid Test, 24 February 1994

... of the arising comparisons are relatively simple ones. Both Joyce and Rushdie write about being priest-ridden. Both come from countries dismembered by the British Empire. Both exiled themselves to metropoles like Paris and London. Both kept in touch with their respective homelands nonetheless. But it is when he attends to the language that Al-Azm ...

Dark Tom

Christopher Ricks, 1 December 1983

Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley 1933-1980 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 323 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 436 28852 4
Show More
Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Fontana, 274 pp., £2.50, October 1983, 0 00 636644 9
Show More
Show More
... is playing ‘Dixie’. A man got his hand outstretched. Could be the Führer, could be the local priest. You know sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace. The Führer or the local priest? Does the Church collide with or collude with Fascism? But as Skidelsky acknowledges, Mosley’s ‘peace campaign’ was notable for ...

A Snack before I Die

James Wood, 21 August 1997

Anton Chekhov: A Life 
by Donald Rayfield.
HarperCollins, 674 pp., £25, June 1997, 0 00 255503 4
Show More
Show More
... at the local asylum about Marcus Aurelius and the importance of stoicism, and in the fatuous priest in ‘In the Ravine’ who, at dinner, comforts a woman who has lost her baby while pointing at her with ‘a fork with a pickled mushroom on the end of it’. Yet the son did not abandon the father. Once the Chekhovs had moved to Moscow, Anton calmly ...

Losers

Conrad Russell, 4 October 1984

The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries 
by Christopher Hill.
Faber, 342 pp., £12.50, July 1984, 0 571 13237 5
Show More
Show More
... causes were forced to explain to themselves why they had lost, why ‘new presbyter is but old priest writ large,’ or why the Saints had visibly failed to reign. To those who believed their cause was God’s, the experience was as traumatic as any suffered by Job. So far is common ground: the defeat of 17th-century radicalism was long-lasting and ...

Goings-On at Eagle Lake

Christopher Tayler: Barry Hannah, 29 November 2001

Yonder Stands Your Orphan 
by Barry Hannah.
Atlantic, 336 pp., £9.99, September 2001, 1 903809 16 9
Show More
Show More
... Much time is spent in the company of Egan’s uncle, Carl Bob Feeney, an ancient Irish ex-priest who boasts of his likeness to ‘the expatriate atheist writer Samuel Beckett’. With his equally decrepit friend Ulrich, Feeney devotes his remaining days to rampaging around the lakeside sermonising on behalf of the animals, even inducing Egan to recite ...

Closer to God

Adam Bradbury, 14 May 1992

1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile 
by Homero Aridjis, translated by Betty Ferber.
Deutsch, 284 pp., £14.99, October 1991, 0 233 98727 4
Show More
The Campaign 
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Alfred MacAdam.
Deutsch, 246 pp., £14.99, November 1991, 0 233 98726 6
Show More
The Penguin Book of Latin American Short Stories 
edited by Thomas Colchie.
Viking, 448 pp., £15.99, January 1992, 0 670 84299 0
Show More
Show More
... not because it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We may be on dodgy ground, then, lumping together two Mexican novels – one about the South American uprising of 1810 and one about the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century – but for the fact that both try to ...

Haddock blows his top

Christopher Tayler: Hergé’s Redemption, 7 June 2012

Hergé: The Man who Created Tintin 
by Pierre Assouline, translated by Charles Ruas.
Oxford, 276 pp., £9.99, October 2011, 978 0 19 983727 4
Show More
Hergé, Son of Tintin 
by Benoît Peeters, translated by Tina Kover.
Johns Hopkins, 394 pp., £15.50, November 2011, 978 1 4214 0454 7
Show More
Show More
... he was taken on as a designer and cartoonist in 1927. His boss, Norbert Wallez, was a charismatic priest of anti-parliamentary, Germanophile views – Protestant Prussia excluded – who believed that Jews and Freemasons were behind the Versailles treaty. In his office Wallez kept a signed portrait of Mussolini inscribed: ‘To Norbert Wallez, a friend of ...

Armadillo

Christopher Ricks, 16 September 1982

Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent 
by Donald Davie.
University of Notre Dame Press, 154 pp., £11.85, June 1982, 0 268 00852 3
Show More
These the Companions 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 220 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 521 24511 7
Show More
Show More
... believers, cultivating like so many urban gardeners the individual conscience as against some priest-given ‘religious consciousness’? The italics here are mine – mine, who am no Polish bad or lapsed Roman Catholic but an Englishman bred, unless I am mistaken, much nearer than Edward Thompson to the heart of English Dissenting Protestantism. And ...

Death among the Barbours

Christopher Tayler: Donna Tartt, 19 December 2013

The Goldfinch 
by Donna Tartt.
Little, Brown, 771 pp., £20, October 2013, 978 1 4087 0494 3
Show More
Show More
... bag from Gristede’s over there.’ Reminders that he might have ended up a ‘cop or tough priest’ in Albany only cement his position at the top of the story’s chain of being. To Theo, in Las Vegas, his letters carry ‘a whisper of quiet rooms and money’. Theo, like Richard in The Secret History, moves easily between the levels of grandeur on ...

Putting on the Plum

Christopher Tayler: Richard Flanagan, 31 October 2002

Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish 
by Richard Flanagan.
Atlantic, 404 pp., £16.99, June 2002, 1 84354 021 5
Show More
Show More
... mother died during his birth. Brought up in an English poorhouse and educated by a paedophile priest, he claims to have had numerous adventures around the world – including an unlikely stint in Louisiana, where, he says, he learned painting from a certain ‘Jean-Babeuf Audubon’, presumably a near relative of John James Audubon. On returning to ...

Great Male Narcissist

Christopher Tayler: Sigrid Nunez, 1 August 2019

Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury 
by Sigrid Nunez.
Soft Skull, 172 pp., £12.50, August 2019, 978 1 59376 582 8
Show More
The Friend 
by Sigrid Nunez.
Virago, 213 pp., £8.99, February 2019, 978 0 349 01281 0
Show More
Show More
... of ‘excluding them. They say it’s a lie that writing is a religion requiring the devotion of a priest. They say it’s ridiculous.’ One student is ‘concerned that so much of the assigned reading includes books that failed to make money or are now out of print. Shouldn’t we be studying more successful writers?’ Morale isn’t high among the faculty ...

Open Book

Nicholas Spice, 4 September 1986

A Simple Story 
by S.Y. Agnon, translated by Hillel Halkin.
246 pp., £13.10, March 1986, 0 8052 3999 5
Show More
At the Handles of the Lock: Themes in the Fiction of S.Y. Agnon 
by David Aberbach.
Oxford, 221 pp., £18, November 1984, 0 19 710040 6
Show More
Snakewrist 
by Christopher Burns.
Cape, 240 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 224 02351 9
Show More
Show More
... and its ways, seem simply to have been found, not made. And how simply. These are arts which Christopher Burns has yet to master. There are others, however, of which he already has an impressive command. Snakewrist, a first novel of unusual promise, is far too concerned with getting across a message to sustain over its full length the illusion of being ...

What’s Coming

David Edgar: J.M. Synge, 22 March 2001

Fool of the Family: A Life of J.M. Synge 
by W.J. McCormack.
Weidenfeld, 499 pp., £25, March 2000, 0 297 64612 5
Show More
Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991-2000 
edited by Nicholas Grene.
Lilliput, 220 pp., £29.95, July 2000, 1 901866 47 5
Show More
Show More
... play consists of the couple’s frustrating attempts to negotiate financial terms with a passing priest and then to keep to them; at the end, even force fails to bring about Sarah’s entry to the ranks of the respectable poor and the priest is ‘master of the situation’. The point, however, is that she has had her ...

Danger-Men

Tom Shippey, 2 February 1989

A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church 
by Christopher Hill.
Oxford, 394 pp., £19.50, October 1988, 0 19 812818 5
Show More
The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History 
by Anne Hudson.
Oxford, 556 pp., £48, July 1988, 0 19 822762 0
Show More
Show More
... Christopher Hill has shown literary critics the way before now. Many must have felt at least mildly chastened by his remarks in Milton and the English Revolution (1977), no less forceful for their studied moderation, on remembering the effects on Paradise Lost of censorship, fear, a social context in which men were hanged for expressing Miltonic opinions and judges expressed regret at not being able to order sentences of death by burning ...

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