Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 533 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Love Poems for Alice with Old Cars

Robert Crawford, 25 April 1991

... Through Alexandria to Loch Lomond past the indigenous Argyll Motors Factory with its built-to-last Stone car over the door. People call you odd, Determined, unchaperoned, ‘fast’. Your wheels cover Scotland, familiar and intimate, Tin-Lizzying Right up Ben Nevis, mass-produced, Laughing with the dash of the woman driver’s TS1, first car in Dundee. Your ...

On Robert Silvers

Andrew O’Hagan: Remembering Robert Silvers, 20 April 2017

... on West 60th Street and held the menu up to the light, scrutinising it as if it was a precious stone. He ordered iced tea and turned to me. ‘I come here all the time,’ he said. ‘It means you can sit next to your friend and hear what they’re saying. It’s good to hear what your friend is saying.’ ‘Maybe half the time,’ I said. He laughed and ...

Three Poems

Robert Crawford, 24 June 2004

... down Maes Howe’s Five-thousand-year-old chute, Walked unbowed down its entrance passage Whose stone slabs weigh forty-five cars. Nine chased Nine with dog-track speed Round Orphir’s circular kirk, Dropped down rung after midnight rung Metres into Wideford Hill. Nine and Seven bounced and drummed On the capstone over Brough of Birsay’s Pictish ...

Mecca Bound

Robert Irwin, 21 July 1994

The Hajj: Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places 
by F.E. Peters.
Princeton, 399 pp., £19.95, July 1994, 0 691 02120 1
Show More
Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans 
by Suraiya Faroqhi.
Tauris, 244 pp., £34.50, May 1994, 1 85043 606 1
Show More
The Hadj: A Pilgrimage to Mecca 
by Michael Wolfe.
Secker, 331 pp., £19.99, January 1994, 0 436 58404 2
Show More
Show More
... In the section of The Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to the perils of religious enthusiasm, Robert Burton pauses briefly to comment on the complex and meritorious rituals of the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca: their fastings, their running till they sweat, their long prayers, Mahomets temple, tombe, and building of it, would aske a whole volume to dilate: and for their paines taken in this holy pilgrimage, all their sins are forgiven, and they are reputed so many saints ...

Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit

Robert Crawford, 19 July 2001

... Croy. Ee. Gaw. Thrawnly as a couple long and long for a child, Hopelessly, edgily, until their own stone opens. Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Pit: to dig holes, marking an edge. Pit: a portion, or a piece of land, a homestead, Pittenweem, Pitmillie, Pittodrie, Pittencrieff. Pit: the only syllable we know Was born from the obliterated Pictish language – One ...

Us and Them

Robert Taubman, 4 September 1980

The Secret Servant 
by Gavin Lyall.
Hodder, 224 pp., £5.50, June 1980, 0 340 25385 1
Show More
The Flowers of the Forest 
by Joseph Hone.
Secker, 365 pp., £5.95, July 1980, 0 436 20087 2
Show More
A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie 
by Robert Barnard.
Collins, 203 pp., £5.95, April 1980, 0 00 216190 7
Show More
Enter the Lion: A Posthumus Memoir of Mycroft Holmes 
by Michael Hodel and Sean Wright.
Dent, 237 pp., £4.95, May 1980, 0 460 04483 4
Show More
Dorothy I. Sayers: Nine Literary Studies 
by Trevor Hall.
Duckworth, 132 pp., £12.50, April 1980, 9780715614556
Show More
Milk Dime 
by Barry Fantoni.
Hodder, 192 pp., £5.50, May 1980, 0 340 25350 9
Show More
Show More
... private secretary is given a family set of rooms in Albany where, ‘coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time gate, back seventy-five years to the days when the Empire was built of solid dark mahogany and pictures of dead animals.’ A Secret Service chief disappears in Joseph Hone’s The Flowers of the Forest ...

Goings-on in the Tivoli Gardens

Christopher Tayler: Marlon James, 5 November 2015

A Brief History of Seven Killings 
by Marlon James.
Oneworld, 688 pp., £8.99, June 2015, 978 1 78074 635 7
Show More
Show More
... himself in knots for the sake of consistency: a character called Alex Pierce, a writer for Rolling Stone whose research seems to be a fantasticated version of White’s, urges himself at one point to ‘head back to Marley’s house’. Marley isn’t left blank, exactly: we hear quite a lot about his under-the-table philanthropy, his physical beauty, his ...

Hiveward-Winging

Robert Irwin, 3 July 1997

Quarantine 
by Jim Crace.
Viking, 243 pp., £16.99, June 1997, 0 670 85697 5
Show More
Show More
... painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising, mirage heat, as if someone had thrown a stone into the pool of air through which it walked and ripples diluted it.’ Crace’s insubstantial Jesus is barely glimpsed by the others. It is hard not to think of another place of rock and no water. Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I ...

In Bloody Orkney

Robert Crawford: George Mackay Brown, 22 February 2007

George Mackay Brown: The Life 
by Maggie Fergusson.
Murray, 363 pp., £25, April 2006, 0 7195 5659 7
Show More
The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown 
edited by Brian Murray.
Murray, 547 pp., £18.99, October 2006, 0 7195 6884 6
Show More
Show More
... in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or ...

Four Poems

Robert Crawford, 16 November 2000

... at Eye-level. Here’s the whole shebang that is Time, place and climate, ebbing, dancing, set In stone and motion, calmly at the ready Before and after, purled in helices, Every last atom pregnant with an A. Oan Paip J2 Genua cui patrem, genitricem Graecia, partum pontus et unda dedit, num bonus esse potes? fallaces Ligures, et mendax Graecia, ponto nulla ...

How to Hiss and Huff

Robert Alter: Mann’s Moses, 2 December 2010

The Tables of the Law 
by Thomas Mann, translated by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann.
Haus, 113 pp., £10, October 2010, 978 1 906598 84 6
Show More
Show More
... at the beginning of the book: ‘He himself had taken a fancy to his father’s blood kin, as the stone-carver fancies the shapeless block from which he intends to carve a fine, noble shape, the work of his hands.’ The metaphor of the sculptor recurs, obviously triggered by the fact that Moses will carve the ten ‘words’ (as the Hebrew puts it) in ...

Three Poems

Robert Crawford, 4 November 2004

... shone. A comet. A meteor. Shone, His shell a re-entering rocket, a capsule straight down like a stone From outer peace. Och, plunged in the innermost space Of the dream, he was sure he had lost, and so sure he had won In his way, and would have his day, the Spring Day Of the Slow Start. He played his part Well. He sang his dream and in the spring its claim ...

Still Defending the Scots

Katie Stevenson: Robert the Bruce, 11 September 2014

Robert the Bruce: King of the Scots 
by Michael Penman.
Yale, 443 pp., £25, June 2014, 978 0 300 14872 5
Show More
Show More
... wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace by the prolific Nigel Tranter and, twenty years later, in Braveheart. But Martin was right that the appeal of Bruce would be significantly ...

Fill it with fish

Helen Cooper: The trail of the Grail, 6 June 2002

Parzival and the Stone from Heaven: A Grail Romance Retold for Our Time 
by Lindsay Clarke.
HarperCollins, 239 pp., £14.99, September 2001, 0 00 710813 3
Show More
Merlin and the Grail: ‘Joseph of Arimathea’, ‘Merlin’, ‘Perceval’ The Trilogy of Arthurian Romances Attributed to Robert de Boron 
translated by Nigel Bryant.
Boydell and Brewer, 172 pp., £30, May 2001, 0 85991 616 2
Show More
Le Livre du Graal. Tome I: ‘Joseph D’Arimathie’, ‘Merlin’, ‘Les Premiers Faits du Roi Arthur’ 
edited by Daniel Poirion and Philippe Walter.
Gallimard, 1993 pp., £50.95, April 2001, 2 07 011342 6
Show More
Show More
... it is an end in itself, as it is not for that other object of infinite search, the philosopher’s stone. Alchemists at least knew what they wanted, how to set about looking for it, and what it would do once it had been discovered. The writers of Grail romances often barely knew what their knights were to look for, or how they should reach it, let alone what ...

‘I’m English,’ I said

Christopher Tayler: Colin Thubron, 14 July 2011

To a Mountain in Tibet 
by Colin Thubron.
Chatto, 227 pp., £16.99, February 2011, 978 0 7011 8379 0
Show More
Show More
... into transcendental meditation and gets written up as a Muscovite avatar of a character out of Robert Stone or Joan Didion: Often silences fell between us. Much of the time I felt that she was not in my company at all, nor I in hers. She would close her eyes for long, still minutes, smiling crookedly … I don’t know how she conceived of me. She ...

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