Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 49 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Speech Melodies

Paul Mitchinson: Leoš Janáček, 4 December 2008

Janáček: Years of a Life, Volume I 
by John Tyrrell.
Faber, 971 pp., £60, November 2006, 0 571 17538 4
Show More
Janáček: Years of a Life, Volume II 
by John Tyrrell.
Faber, 1074 pp., £60, November 2007, 978 0 571 23667 1
Show More
Show More
... career and reputation persisted long after his death. In Testaments Betrayed, published in 1993, Milan Kundera complained that his compatriots had still not written ‘a single important musicological study analysing the aesthetic newness’ of Janáček’s work: ‘No complete recorded edition of his works. No complete edition of his theoretical and ...

Diary

James MacGibbon: Fashionable Radicals, 22 January 1987

... its rare triumphs will rarely be unblemished. So it proved with my share in the introduction of Milan Kundera to this country. I read his first novel, The Joke, in German, and the way the story went to and fro in time, together with the injection of what can only be called a monograph on Moravian folk music, seemed certain to confuse English ...

Get out

Julian Bell: Francis Bacon, 19 October 2000

Looking back at Francis Bacon 
by David Sylvester.
Thames and Hudson, 272 pp., £29.95, June 2000, 0 500 01994 0
Show More
Show More
... captured the imagination of literary Paris: Michel Leiris, Philippe Sollers, Gilles Deleuze and Milan Kundera all produced high-flown testimonies to the stature of his work as a comment on the human predicament. Nearer home, the existential fervour surrounding the paintings was kept up by Lawrence Gowing – ‘The imagination that does not recognise ...

Sniffle

Yun Sheng: Mai Jia, 11 September 2014

Decoded: A Novel 
by Mai Jia, translated by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £18.99, March 2014, 978 0 14 139147 2
Show More
Show More
... and reading in China. We got everything from Shakespeare and Cervantes to Marguerite Duras and Milan Kundera. Readers had been starved for more than two decades: some good books sold in their millions. García Márquez topped the list, and as a consequence influenced countless Chinese novelists – including Mo Yan, who confessed that he struggled for ...

Nuremberg Rally, Invasion of Poland, Dunkirk …

James Meek: The never-ending wish to write about the Second World War, 6 September 2001

Ghost MacIndoe 
by Jonathan Buckley.
Fourth Estate, 469 pp., £12.99, April 2001, 1 84115 227 7
Show More
The Twins 
by Tessa de Loo.
Arcadia, 392 pp., £6.99, May 2001, 1 900850 56 7
Show More
Riptide 
by John Lawton.
Weidenfeld, 322 pp., £16.99, March 2001, 0 297 64345 2
Show More
The Day We Had Hitler Home 
by Rodney Hall.
Granta, 361 pp., £15.99, April 2001, 1 86207 384 8
Show More
Five Quarters of the Orange 
by Joanne Harris.
Doubleday, 431 pp., £12.99, April 2001, 0 385 60169 7
Show More
The Fire Fighter 
by Francis Cottam.
Chatto, 240 pp., £15.99, March 2001, 0 7011 6981 8
Show More
The Element of Water 
by Stevie Davies.
Women’s Press, 253 pp., £9.99, April 2001, 0 7043 4705 9
Show More
The Bronze Horsewoman 
by Paullina Simons.
Flamingo, 637 pp., £6.99, April 2001, 0 00 651322 0
Show More
The Siege 
by Helen Dunmore.
Penguin, 304 pp., £16.99, June 2001, 0 670 89718 3
Show More
Show More
... Let a Czech write about Prague in 1968, or a Colombian write about La Violencia. That’s what Milan Kundera and Gabriel García Márquez are there for. No it isn’t. The experiences of Kundera and Márquez in their own countries, their Czechness and Colombianness, give their work something irreproducible by an ...

Coming out top

Paul Driver, 8 September 1994

The Bartók Companion 
edited by Malcolm Gillies.
Faber, 586 pp., £35, February 1994, 0 571 15330 5
Show More
Show More
... the phrase. Speaking of his addiction to seven-part novelistic structures in The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera insists that they don’t ‘represent some superstitious flirtation with magical numbers, or any rational calculation, but a deep, unconscious, incomprehensible drive, an archetype of form that I cannot escape.’ Something of the sort was ...

Diary

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Putting in the Commas, 15 September 1988

... to the reader to be merely a matter of chance whether this week will find Joe Smith writing about Milan Kundera in the Guardian, about Kafka in the Observer, or Keats in the TLS. Since every paper has some writers with which it is specially associated, I am again exaggerating – but not that much. What principally distinguishes one paper from another ...

A Bit of Ginger

Theo Tait: Gordon Burn, 5 June 2008

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel 
by Gordon Burn.
Faber, 214 pp., £15.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 19729 3
Show More
Show More
... has become a kind of fiction, constantly shaped and tweaked and distorted. As the epigraph from Milan Kundera puts it, ‘Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the ...

Father and Son

Tony Gould, 23 June 1988

When the fighting is over: A Personal Story of the Battle for Tumbledown Mountain and its Aftermath 
by John Lawrence and Robert Lawrence.
Bloomsbury, 196 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 7475 0174 2
Show More
Tumbledown 
by Charles Wood.
Penguin, 80 pp., £3.95, April 1988, 0 14 011198 0
Show More
Show More
... of its individual regiments and is more or less indistinguishable from the Civil Service. As Milan Kundera puts it in a reference to The Good Soldier Schweik: ‘Hasek’s army is nothing but an immense bureaucratic institution, an army-administration in which the old military virtues (courage, cunning, skill) no longer matter.’ Robert ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Rape-Rape, 5 November 2009

... I got twitchy when I read the petition written by Bernard-Henri Lévy, and signed by Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, William Shawcross, Claude Lanzmann, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols, Neil Jordan, and, to bring up the female numbers, Diane von Furstenberg, the Isabelles Adjani and Huppert, Yamani Benguigui, Danièle Thompson and Arielle Dombasle. It ...

Andante Capriccioso

Karl Miller, 20 February 1986

The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha 
by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett.
Deutsch, 846 pp., £15, January 1986, 0 233 97840 2
Show More
Show More
... of reality, and of rationality, form part of the alternative fictional tradition for which Milan Kundera speaks from the cover of the graceful new Penguin translation of Jacques the Fatalist, by Smollett’s contemporary, Diderot.2 Here again are a disputatious master and servant, in an exercise of the self-examining picaresque; here again is a ...

Citizen Grass and the World’s End

Neal Ascherson, 17 October 1985

On Writing and Politics: 1967-1983 
by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Secker, 157 pp., £12, September 1985, 0 436 18773 6
Show More
Günter Grass 
by Ronald Hayman.
Methuen, 80 pp., £2.75, September 1985, 0 416 35490 4
Show More
Show More
... to face with the question: is writing – is anything – worth doing if there is to be no future? Milan Kundera has asked the West, with polite irony, to imagine what it is like to work in a culture which may quite possibly be extinguished – its language, its history eradicated. Grass, in more dramatic shock, confronts the possibility that the entire ...

Hang up your running shoes

Jon Day: Emil Zatopek, 6 October 2016

Today We Die a Little: The Rise and Fall of Emil Zatopek, Olympic Legend 
by Richard Askwith.
Yellow Jersey, 480 pp., £16.99, April 2016, 978 0 224 10034 2
Show More
Endurance: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Emil Zatopek 
by Rick Broadbent.
Wisden, 320 pp., £16.99, April 2016, 978 1 4729 2022 5
Show More
Show More
... But gradually his support for the government waned. Zátopek belonged to the same generation as Milan Kundera, Pavel Kohout and Václav Havel, who had grown up with communism but had begun, by the mid-1960s, to question the direction in which it was going. After the failure of the planned economy he became disenchanted with the regime, and, following ...

Ethnic Cleansers

Stephen Smith, 8 October 1992

Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath 
by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim.
Viking, 430 pp., £17.99, May 1992, 0 670 83233 2
Show More
Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Lucretia Stewart.
Chatto, 261 pp., £10.99, June 1992, 0 7011 3892 0
Show More
Show More
... completely forgotten, erased almost entirely from the national consciousness.’ They also quote Milan Kundera on the struggle of memory against forgetting. Bilton and Sim are entitled to be proud of their efforts, which involved taking a toothcomb to published but neglected documents, as well as negotiating access to material held at the US Army’s ...

Albino Sea-Cucumber

Glen Newey: The Long March of Cornelius Castoriadis, 5 February 1998

The Imaginary Institution of Society 
by Cornelius Castoriadis.
Polity, 418 pp., £14.95, May 1997, 0 7456 1950 9
Show More
Les Carrefours de Labyrinthe: Fait et a faire 
by Cornelius Castoriadis.
Seuil, 281 pp., frs 139, February 1997, 2 02 029909 7
Show More
The Castoriadis Reader 
edited by David Ames Curtis.
Blackwell, 470 pp., £50, May 1997, 1 55786 703 8
Show More
Show More
... since repudiated the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (four words, four lies, as he later told Milan Kundera). His opposition to the USSR and his support of workers’ uprisings in Eastern Europe were bones of contention with Sartre, who later admitted that Castoriadis had been ‘right, but at the wrong time’: Castoriadis riposted, fairly ...

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