Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 42 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Hm, hm and that was all

Rosemary Hill: Queen Mary, 6 December 2018

The Quest for Queen Mary 
by James Pope-Hennessy, edited by Hugo Vickers.
Zuleika, 335 pp., £25, September 2018, 978 1 9997770 3 6
Show More
Show More
... their friends, to say that someone ‘sat there like Queen Mary’ was to indicate that a terminal blight had been cast over the occasion. James Pope-Hennessy, born in 1916, belonged to that generation. He came from a distinguished Catholic and literary family and was a friend of many of his most interesting ...

Trollope’s Delight

Richard Altick, 3 May 1984

The Letters of Anthony Trollope 
edited by John Hall.
Stanford, 1082 pp., $87.50, July 1983, 0 8047 1076 7
Show More
Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art 
by Andrew Wright.
Macmillan, 173 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 34593 2
Show More
Show More
... he wrote. In his autobiography he revealed – a notorious insight into his practice that was to blight his reputation until it rebloomed during the Second World War – that early each morning he placed his watch before him and wrote 250 words every quarter-hour toward his weekly quota, which averaged 40 pages. He reckoned up his wordage as matter-of-factly ...
Citizen Lord: Edward Fitzgerald 1763-98 
by Stella Tillyard.
Chatto, 336 pp., £16.99, May 1997, 0 7011 6538 3
Show More
Show More
... been created Duke of Leinster – had no intention of allowing the misdeeds of one of the clan to blight their prospects in the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Lord Edward paid on both counts for being an aristocrat. Later chroniclers of his socially humbler colleagues in the rebellion preferred to think him romantic and impractical compared to them; while his ...

Dearest Papa

Richard Altick, 1 September 1983

The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin 
edited by George Allan Cate.
Stanford, 251 pp., $28.50, August 1982, 0 8047 1114 3
Show More
Ruskin Today 
by Kenneth Clark.
Penguin, 363 pp., £2.95, October 1982, 0 14 006326 9
Show More
John Ruskin: Letters from the Continent 1858 
edited by John Hayman.
Toronto, 207 pp., £19.50, December 1982, 0 8020 5583 4
Show More
Show More
... the arrival of industrialisation – silk mills, railways, lake steamers, telegraph poles – to blight the Northern Italian landscape. Closer to home, at that moment the stench from the polluted Thames was forcing the Houses of Parliament to sit with canvas over their windows wet with chloride of lime. Father and son compared notes on the impact of ...

On the Window Ledge of the Union

Colin Kidd: Loyalism v. Unionism, 7 February 2013

Belfast 400: People, Place and History 
edited by S.J. Connolly.
Liverpool, 392 pp., £14.95, November 2012, 978 1 84631 634 0
Show More
Ulster since 1600: Politics, Economy and Society 
edited by Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw.
Oxford, 355 pp., £35, November 2012, 978 0 19 958311 9
Show More
The Plantation of Ulster: Ideology and Practice 
edited by Eamonn O Ciardha and Micheál O Siochrú.
Manchester, 269 pp., £70, October 2012, 978 0 7190 8608 3
Show More
The End of Ulster Loyalism? 
by Peter Shirlow.
Manchester, 230 pp., £16.99, May 2012, 978 0 7190 8476 8
Show More
Show More
... further south in Stranmillis. In Belfast the urban motorway – something that has done much to blight city life across the United Kingdom – has a sinister, though not altogether unhappy significance. As Dominic Bryan argues in his lively essay in Belfast 400, the M2 and the Westlink have served as a bleak cordon sanitaire between some of the rival ...

Bring some Madeira

Thomas Keymer: Thomas Love Peacock, 8 February 2018

Nightmare Abbey 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Nicholas A. Joukovsky.
Cambridge, 297 pp., £84.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03186 9
Show More
Crotchet Castle 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Freya Johnston and Matthew Bevis.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £79.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03072 5
Show More
Show More
... Peacock began in the examiner’s office in 1819, working under the Scots economist James Mill and alongside John Stuart Mill (who had been brought into the company by his father in 1823) on a starting salary of £600, which rose with various promotions. It reached £2000 when Peacock succeeded James Mill as ...

Diary

Michael Ignatieff: Canadian Elections, 1 November 1984

... they swung it open and found inside boxes of Agricultural Department leaflets on wheat and potato blight, framed portraits of Mounties on horses, hockey sticks and, in one corner, the holy grail of Canadian identity itself, a life-sized birch-bark canoe. O Canada, our home and native land, True patriot’s love in all thy sons command. Canadians are great ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
Show More
Show More
... The camps aren’t trashy. If only. Rather they occasion inoffence on a dispiriting scale. They blight the plain, which is further defaced by vandals in uniform who treat it as a playground and scrapyard: danger areas and their alarmist signs; unexploded ordnance; live firing (260,000 rounds per annum); burned-out tanks, like an installation by a ...

The State with the Prettiest Name

Michael Hofmann: ‘Florida’, 24 May 2018

Florida 
by Lauren Groff.
Heinemann, 275 pp., £14.99, June 2018, 978 1 78515 188 0
Show More
Show More
... temperate and tropical, man-made and natural. ‘A complex of few interweavings’ is Henry James’s curtly paradoxical summary of the Florida scene. Heavy, stagnant air and violent hurricanes. Paradisiac contentment and accesses of sudden panic. The strange recumbent crescent moons. The deep shadows in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping animal ...

Father, Son and Sewing-Machine

Patrick Parrinder, 21 February 1985

Garden, Ashes 
by Danilo Kis, translated by William Hannaher.
Faber, 170 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 9780571134533
Show More
Star Turn 
by Nigel Williams.
Faber, 314 pp., £9.95, January 1985, 0 571 13296 0
Show More
On Glory’s Course 
by James Purdy.
Peter Owen, 378 pp., £9.95, January 1985, 0 7206 0633 0
Show More
Show More
... into magus and sage, he begins to wonder if his grandiose heresies have not called down a blight on the whole Jewish race. How else explain the pogroms at his door and the forced eviction of his shopkeeping relatives? For a time he takes to drink and then to roaming the woods, living off mushrooms and birds’ eggs and for ever intoning Pantheist ...

What sort of man?

P.N. Furbank, 18 August 1994

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Vol. I: 1854-April 1874 
edited by Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew.
Yale, 525 pp., £29.95, July 1994, 0 300 05183 2
Show More
The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Vol. II: April 1874-July 1879 
edited by Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew.
Yale, 352 pp., £29.95, July 1994, 0 300 06021 1
Show More
Show More
... reason that many people who actually knew him, including someone with so good a judgment as Henry James, found him utterly charming. The charm, if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was ...

Other Selves

John Bayley, 29 October 1987

How I Grew 
by Mary McCarthy.
Weidenfeld, 278 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 0 297 79170 2
Show More
Myself and Michael Innes 
by J.I.M. Stewart.
Gollancz, 206 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 575 04104 8
Show More
Show More
... writing had become a habit quite lacking in relish, intensity or surprise. This strange American blight may, in both cases, be a deliberate effect: but if so, it is a dangerous tactic to adopt in a book of recollection. The reader is more easily seduced by the writer for whom the distance of the past lends enchantment, or at least the appearance of it. With ...

Adored Gazelle

Ferdinand Mount: Cherubino at Number Ten, 20 March 2008

Balfour: The Last Grandee 
by R.J.Q. Adams.
Murray, 479 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 7195 5424 7
Show More
Show More
... wife Eleanor Balfour founded Newnham College. In 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G.K. Chesterton, R.B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding the Synthetic Society, which, in an age of waning faith, set out to contribute towards a working philosophy of religious belief. A decade earlier, several of the same cast had joined ...

Find the birch sticks

R.W. Johnson: A spy’s diary, 1 September 2005

The Guy Liddell Diaries. Vol. I: 1939-42 
edited by Nigel West.
Frank Cass, 329 pp., £25, February 2005, 0 415 35213 4
Show More
Show More
... his terms. One notes with despair the presence in Lloyd George’s camp of the News Chronicle’s James Horrabin and Hore-Belisha, the most prominent Jewish politician of his day. One notes, rather more suspiciously, that this initiative was timed to coincide exactly with Hess’s similar bid for a separate peace. A separate peace of any kind would have ...

Strangers

John Lanchester, 11 July 1991

Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon 
edited by Stephen Egger.
Praeger, 250 pp., £33.50, October 1990, 0 275 92986 8
Show More
Serial Killers 
by Joel Norris.
Arrow, 333 pp., £4.99, July 1990, 0 09 971750 6
Show More
Life after Life 
by Tony Parker.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.50, May 1991, 0 330 31528 5
Show More
American Psycho 
by Bret Easton Ellis.
Picador, 399 pp., £6.99, April 1991, 0 330 31992 2
Show More
Dirty Weekend 
by Helen Zahavi.
Macmillan, 185 pp., £13.99, April 1991, 0 333 54723 3
Show More
Silence of the Lambs 
by Thomas Harris.
Mandarin, 366 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 0 7493 0942 3
Show More
Show More
... have recently provided the material for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A ...

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