Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 38 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

... now?’The undertakers zipped him into a mauve body bag and took him away. A few days later, Alexander, my older brother, went to the funeral home – all these homes, this last being the least homely – to choose a coffin. He reported that Daddy had been installed in a garage which, it had been stressed, was modified to mortuary standards. We bundled ...

Get over it!

Corey Robin: Antonin Scalia, 10 June 2010

American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 
by Joan Biskupic.
Farrar, Straus, 434 pp., $28, November 2009, 978 0 374 20289 7
Show More
Show More
... the traditional greats of American judicial review – to whom he looks for guidance: it is Alexander Bickel, arguably the most self-conscious of the 20th-century liberal theoreticians, who ‘taught me more than anyone else about this subject’. Like many originalists, Scalia claims that his jurisprudence has nothing to do with his conservatism: ‘I ...

Shorn and Slathered

Christine Smallwood: ‘Reynard the Fox’, 5 November 2015

Reynard the Fox: A New Translation 
by James Simpson.
Liveright, 256 pp., £16.99, March 2015, 978 0 87140 736 8
Show More
Show More
... histoire burlesque chantée et jouée, based on the tales collected by the Russian folklorist Alexander Afanasyev. The piece, which he finished in 1916 but wasn’t staged until 1922, was meant to be performed by acrobats, dancers or clowns in front of the theatre curtain or on a trestle stage in front of the orchestra. The action begins with Renard ...

I have gorgeous hair

Emily Wilson: Epictetus says relax, 1 June 2023

The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses and Fragments 
by Epictetus, translated by Robin Waterfield.
Chicago, 460 pp., £44, October 2022, 978 0 226 76933 2
Show More
Show More
... But one of his many students, Arrian (famous also for his account of the eastern campaigns of Alexander the Great), wrote what he described as a verbatim record of Epictetus’ teaching, in four books, known as the Discourses. He also wrote a separate summary of it, known as the Handbook. A short, accessible pamphlet, the Handbook (Encheiridion in ...

Commotion in Moscow

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Paris Syndrome, 1 August 2019

To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture 
by Eleonory Gilburd.
Harvard, 458 pp., £28.95, January 2019, 978 0 674 98071 6
Show More
Show More
... input on the part of the translator. ‘Having preserved a Scotsman in Burns’, the editor Alexander Tvardovsky said of the poet Samuil Marshak’s translation, Marshak had nevertheless ‘made him a Russian’. I might have taken this as a mere rhetorical flourish had I not, in the 1960s, heard the Soviet bard Iuly Kim singing Marshak’s version of ...

At the Centre Pompidou

Jeremy Harding: Beat Generation, 8 September 2016

... Lolita, various unreadable works by Henry Miller, pornographic novels by Christopher Logue and Alexander Trocchi, a para-Beat from Glasgow, and Trocchi’s ghosted volume of the Frank Harris memoirs (Trocchi was Olympia’s ‘top all-out literary stallion’, according to Girodias). Olympia went on to publish two more works by Burroughs, The Soft Machine ...

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

... airless space. I hated it, and only went inside a couple of times, probably dared by my brother, Alexander. Daddy always walked straight past it. A bit further on, next to a lock, there was an even smaller pillbox, but I never got beyond putting my foot in the doorway.When we asked Daddy what these pillboxes were for, he said they had been put there during ...

Tilting the day

Lisa Cohen: Writing about Clothes, 7 November 2019

Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes 
by Shahidha Bari.
Cape, 312 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 78733 149 5
Show More
Show More
... includes, among other examples, the sane, sly, knowledgeable prose of the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan, who not only covers collections but also analyses the looks of American public figures. And there is more reporting on the working and living conditions of the people who make the clothes – from the growing and harvesting of plants (cotton and ...

White Coats v. Bow Ties

Nicholas Penny, 11 February 1993

Jacopo della Quercia 
by James Beck.
Columbia, 598 pp., $109.50, February 1992, 0 231 07200 7
Show More
Michelangelo and the Creation of the Sistine Chapel 
by Robin Richmond.
Barrie and Jenkins, 160 pp., £18.99, April 1992, 0 7126 5290 6
Show More
Rembrandt. The Master and his Workshop: Paintings 
by Christopher Brown, Jan Kelch and Pieter van Thiel.
Yale, 396 pp., £35, September 1991, 0 300 05149 2
Show More
Michelangelo’s Drawings: The Science of Attribution 
by Alexander Perrig.
Yale, 299 pp., £35, June 1991, 0 300 03948 4
Show More
Michelangelo and his Drawings 
by Michael Hirst.
Yale, 128 pp., £14.95, August 1990, 0 300 04391 0
Show More
The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation 
by James Saslow.
Yale, 559 pp., £22.50, April 1991, 0 300 04960 9
Show More
Show More
... on the subject and some have been no less alarmed by what they have seen in the chapel itself. Robin Richmond’s Michelangelo and the Creation of the Sistine Chapel is a popular introduction which will rightly enrage anyone who has been alarmed. ‘I grew up in Rome and was so familiar with Michelangelo that I never questioned whether his work looked now ...

Even If You Have to Starve

Ian Penman: Mod v. Trad, 29 August 2013

Mod: A Very British Style 
by Richard Weight.
Bodley Head, 478 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 224 07391 2
Show More
Show More
... Mod wideboys? Doubtless it was never quite so cut and dried. Skim the sub rosa lit of the time (Robin Cook, Alexander Baron, Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of ...

Skeltonics

Helen Cooper: The maverick poetry of John Skelton, 14 December 2006

John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak 
by Jane Griffiths.
Oxford, 213 pp., £50, February 2006, 9780199273607
Show More
Show More
... 16th century was for buffoonery: he was turned into a jest-book figure, and in Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood play within a play, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, a ‘real-life’ Skelton takes the role of Friar Tuck. His recovery came on the back of the rise of Modernism, with its opening of readers’ minds to new kinds of ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... schools and ‘learning systems’ in ‘emerging markets’ such as Brazil. The main speaker was Robin Alexander, the chair of the Cambridge Primary Review Trust, which began in 2006 as an inquiry into the ‘condition and future’ of primary education. The CPR Trust now receives core funding from Pearson. The topic was the new primary school ...

You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair, 25 February 1993

Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror 
by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.99, October 1992, 0 330 32284 2
Show More
Gangland: London’s Underworld 
by James Morton.
Little, Brown, 349 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 356 20889 3
Show More
Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read 
by Leonard Read and James Morton.
Warner, 318 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 7515 0001 1
Show More
Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 
by Robert Murphy.
Faber, 182 pp., £15.99, February 1993, 0 571 15442 5
Show More
Show More
... like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the stuff) or by condescending arts ...

Wasp-Waisted Minoans

Miranda Carter: Mary Renault’s Heroes, 13 April 2023

‘The King Must Die’ and ‘The Bull from the Sea’ 
by Mary Renault.
Everyman, 632 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 1 84159 409 5
Show More
Show More
... history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them ...

Only More So

Rosemary Hill: 1950s Women, 19 December 2013

Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties 
by Rachel Cooke.
Virago, 368 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 1 84408 740 2
Show More
Show More
... War was looming when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated ...

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