Search Results

Advanced Search

16 to 30 of 35 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Glaucus and Ione

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 17 April 1980

The Last Days of Pompeii 
by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton.
Sidgwick, 522 pp., £6.95, December 1979, 0 283 98587 9
Show More
Show More
... could to encourage excavation. In England, too, Classicism came into fashion: this was the age of Stuart and Revett’s journeys, the folios of the Society of Dilettanti and Wood’s essay on the original genius of Homer. During the Seventies, Sir William Hamilton, who had personally taken part in the excavations, did much to make the new discoveries ...

Fugitive Crusoe

Tom Paulin: Daniel Defoe, 19 July 2001

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 
by Maximilian Novak.
Oxford, 756 pp., £30, April 2001, 0 19 812686 7
Show More
Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe 
edited by W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank.
Pickering & Chatto, £595, December 2000, 1 85196 465 7
Show More
Show More
... the horrid fanatic plot, contrived for the bringing in, as they then called him, Charles Stuart, and the restoring of monarchy.’ This remark functions mainly as an alibi for his loyalty to the post-Protectorate political structure, and is intended to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John ...

Paraphernalia

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Tudor Spin, 19 November 2009

Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in 16th-Century England 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Yale, 588 pp., £30, April 2009, 978 0 300 14098 9
Show More
Show More
... than Henry VIII: the ignominious sidelining of his harmless and agreeable son in favour of another Stuart – Mary’s coup d’état of 1553 replayed as farce – showed the advantages of the glamour which royal families enjoyed, just as Charles I’s fate had demonstrated the pitfalls. Sharpe’s writing is vigorous and his overall picture convincing and ...

How Wicked – Horrid

David Blackbourn: Two Duff Kings, 15 July 1999

Young Wilhelm: The Kaiser’s Early Life, 1859-88 
by John Röhl, translated by Jeremy Gaines.
Cambridge, 979 pp., £45, October 1999, 0 521 49752 3
Show More
Show More
... issue was closely tied to political concerns. Well-educated, ambitious, a keen reader of John Stuart Mill and a very English Crown Princess at a hated Prussian Court, she initially dreamed of her eldest son as a liberal Frederick the Great. Instead, he and his closest siblings Heinrich and Charlotte became ‘complete Prussians in their nature’. It was ...

Emvowelled

Thomas Keymer: Muddy Texts, 25 January 2024

Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early 18th-Century Literature 
by Abigail Williams.
Princeton, 328 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 691 17068 8
Show More
Show More
... revolution arrive with unmistakable force. Thanks to a convergence of factors (the lapse of Stuart licensing systems, improvements in print technology and distribution networks, expanding literacy rates and a new consumer culture), early 18th-century Britain saw an explosion of print on metropolitan and even provincial streets, and at the coffee houses ...

Only Sleeping

Anne Barton: Variations on Elizabeth I, 10 July 2003

England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy 
by Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson.
Oxford, 348 pp., £19.99, November 2002, 0 19 818377 1
Show More
Show More
... surrendered their spindle, distaff and knife into her hands, and she had to accept the golden ball of discord now resolved as a tribute from Diana, her tutelary goddess. Philip Sidney in The Lady of May, the little entertainment he staged in 1578 at Leicester’s park and gardens of Wanstead, went so far as to impose an unscripted speaking part on the ...

You and Your Bow and the Gods

Colin Burrow: Murder mysteries, 22 September 2005

A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels and Systems of Thought 
by Stephen Kern.
Princeton, 437 pp., £18.95, August 2004, 0 691 11523 0
Show More
Show More
... Bateman kills a girlfriend, apparently because she thought that his suit was designed by Henry Stuart rather than Giorgio Armani. This reduces murder to the merely satirical. A motive and an action are set up against each other in a way that says, without very much intelligence or subtlety: ‘These are the motives which this society says matter and they ...

It isn’t the lines

Bee Wilson: Paul Newman’s Looks, 16 February 2023

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man 
by Paul Newman, edited by David Rosenthal.
Century, 320 pp., £25, October 2022, 978 1 5291 9706 8
Show More
The Last Movie Stars 
directed by Ethan Hawke.
HBO/CNN
Show More
Show More
... The most obvious example is Cool Hand Luke (1967), a prison drama superbly directed by Stuart Rosenberg, whose background was in television, in which he plays a prisoner, beautiful and insouciant in denim, who refuses to submit to the demands of the authorities: ‘Just a lot of guys laying down a lot of rules and regulations’. Luke’s rebellion ...

Burrinchini’s Spectre

Peter Clarke, 19 January 1984

That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in 19th-Century Intellectual History 
by Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow.
Cambridge, 385 pp., £25, November 1983, 9780521257626
Show More
Show More
... anything resembling the metaphor of a well-drilled team, with each player ready to run with the ball when his turn comes, before passing to the next man. But unless Malthus and Macaulay, Bagehot and Sidgwick can agree on what game they are playing, it is not clear what they are doing here, along with such as Dugald Stewart, David Ricardo, the ...

Inside the Head

John Barrell: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Coleridge: Darker Reflections 
by Richard Holmes.
HarperCollins, 512 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 0 00 654842 3
Show More
Show More
... hearts’, as the blurb has it. But apart from some pages on Coleridge’s life of Sir Alexander Ball, his former boss in Malta, there is very little indeed on what the Friend was actually about. Biographia Literaria is the other text to receive extended treatment here, mainly as a story of the miraculous, willed recovery Coleridge made in writing it, from ...

Crack Open the Shells

Hal Foster: The Situationist Moment, 12 March 2009

Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) 
by Guy Debord, translated by Stuart Kendall and John McHale.
Semiotext(e), 397 pp., £12.95, February 2009, 978 1 58435 055 2
Show More
Show More
... Society of the Spectacle (1973). Played by Orson Welles, the lordly Arkadin tells his guests at a ball in his castle the parable of the scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river. ‘Why should I risk it?’ the frog replies. ‘You’ll sting me.’ The scorpion responds that all logic would prevent such an outcome, for he too would then perish ...

Shoot them to be sure

Richard Gott: The Oxford History of the British Empire, 25 April 2002

The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. I: The Origins of Empire 
edited by William Roger Louis and Nicholas Canny.
Oxford, 533 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924676 9
Show More
The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. II: The 18th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and P.J. Marshall.
Oxford, 639 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924677 7
Show More
The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III: The 19th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and Andrew Porter.
Oxford, 774 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924678 5
Show More
The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. IV: The 20th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and Judith Brown.
Oxford, 773 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924679 3
Show More
The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. V: Historiography 
edited by William Roger Louis and Robin Winks.
Oxford, 731 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924680 7
Show More
Show More
... pictures of indigenous peoples displaced.’ Contemporary Australian historians, we are told by Stuart Macintyre, have recovered ‘a forgotten history of genocidal expropriation of Aboriginal Australians’. These are welcome contributions, yet neither writer can explain why these issues are so neglected in the earlier volumes. C.A. Bayly, the Vere ...

A Time for War

Peter Clarke, 21 October 1982

The Rebirth of Britain 
edited by Wayland Kennet.
Weidenfeld, 275 pp., £12, October 1982, 0 297 78177 4
Show More
Claret and Chips 
by Hugh Stephenson.
Joseph, 201 pp., £8.95, September 1982, 0 7181 2204 6
Show More
Show More
... of supreme power in British politics. As Nye Bevan used to say, why look into the crystal ball when you can read the book? But this is only half the story. The other half concerns the Liberal Party and in particular the role of David Steel. It may not be true that Jenkins was dissuaded from joining the Liberal Party by Steel, but plainly the two men ...

Success

Benjamin Markovits: What It Takes to Win at Sport, 7 November 2013

... the lessons of corporate efficiency to the problem of winning ballgames. What if, instead of a ball club, with all its codes, traditions and biases, we took something like ‘British culture’, with all its codes, traditions, biases etc? What strikes me most looking back on my little confrontation with Mrs Hazel is not what a tick I must have been (though ...

Where to Draw the Line

Stefan Collini: Why do we pay tax?, 19 October 2023

... attempted to identify returns that arise from control over scarce or monopolised assets. John Stuart Mill stated the underlying principle in 1848: Suppose that there is a kind of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or sacrifice on the part of the owners: those owners constituting a class in the community, whom the natural ...

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