Search Results

Advanced Search

136 to 150 of 200 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown: The Real Gangs of New York, 23 January 2003

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 
by Herbert Asbury.
Arrow, 366 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 0 09 943674 4
Show More
Gangs of New York 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
December 2002
Show More
Show More
... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century ...

So much for genes

Adrian Woolfson: The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Keller, 8 March 2001

The Century of the Gene 
by Evelyn Fox Keller.
Harvard, 186 pp., £15.95, October 2000, 0 674 00372 1
Show More
Show More
... time’. Have we then reached a point when we need to invent a new vocabulary? In 1961, François Jacob and Jacques Monod concluded that ‘the genome contains not only a series of blue-prints, but a co-ordinated programme of protein synthesis and the means of controlling its execution.’ Recent advances in our understanding of developmental processes ...

Diary

Celia Paul: Lucian Freud’s Sitters, 12 September 2024

... was replaced by a Bacon-inspired freedom.Freud’s first wife was Kitty Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein. In Girl with Roses (1947-48), Kitty is shown sitting on an elegant wicker chair with a curved dark frame. The wood looks newly polished, though its perfection is broken by a few tufts of wicker poking through where the armrest meets the seat. She ...

Why name a ship after a defeated race?

Thomas Laqueur: New Lives of the ‘Titanic’, 24 January 2013

The Wreck of the ‘Titan’ 
by Morgan Robertson.
Hesperus, 85 pp., £8, March 2012, 978 1 84391 359 7
Show More
Shadow of the ‘Titanic’ 
by Andrew Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 1 84739 882 6
Show More
‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition: A Night Remembered 
by Stephanie Barczewski.
Continuum, 350 pp., £15.99, December 2011, 978 1 4411 6169 7
Show More
The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’: Day by Day Facsimile Reports 
by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton.
Transatlantic, 127 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 907176 83 8
Show More
‘Titanic’ Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 404 pp., £9.99, September 2012, 978 0 00 732166 7
Show More
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage 
by Hugh Brewster.
Robson, 338 pp., £20, March 2012, 978 1 84954 179 4
Show More
‘Titanic’ Calling 
edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth.
Bodleian, 163 pp., £14.99, April 2012, 978 1 85124 377 8
Show More
Show More
... eggs and hothouse grapes and peaches. There were pink roses and white daisies on the table. John Jacob Astor, the richest man in America, and his young new wife, Madeleine, were on their honeymoon. The 46-year-old mining magnate Ben Guggenheim was having dinner in the rococo dining room with his latest mistress, Ninette, a 24-year-old cabaret ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
Show More
Show More
... to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school ...

Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle: The vampiric Mercedes de Acosta, 24 June 2004

‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta 
by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 210 pp., £16.95, June 2004, 0 8093 2579 9
Show More
Women in Turmoil: Six Plays 
by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 252 pp., £26.95, June 2003, 0 8093 2509 8
Show More
Show More
... Astor in attendance on opening night. It closed after a few snaggle-toothed performances. In Jacob Slovak (1923), the one de Acosta play to have some success (John Gielgud appeared in a short-lived London production), Mercedes again depicted doomed heterosexual love. The heroine is a New England village girl who has a ...

Baffled at a Bookcase

Alan Bennett: My Libraries, 28 July 2011

... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...

The crematorium is a zoo

Joshua Cohen: H.G. Adler, 3 March 2016

The Wall 
by H.G. Adler, translated by Peter Filkins.
Modern Library, 672 pp., £12.99, September 2015, 978 0 8129 8315 9
Show More
Show More
... camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt.’ judge halevi: Was he there? state prosecutor bar-or: He himself was in Theresienstadt. I simply hesitate to burden the court with material. This is an ...

Just Had To

R.W. Johnson: LBJ, 20 March 2003

The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Vol III: Master of the Senate 
by Robert A. Caro.
Cape, 1102 pp., £30, August 2002, 0 394 52836 0
Show More
Show More
... the state’s other senator, James Eastland, would not only glare at New York’s Jewish senator, Jacob Javits, and say things like ‘I don’t like you or your kind’ but actually proposed that Congress limit the number of Jews conducting interstate businesses because ten thousand Jewish drygoods merchants represented ‘discrimination against the ...

Working under Covers

Paul Laity: Mata Hari, 8 January 2004

Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War 
by Tammy Proctor.
New York, 205 pp., $27, June 2003, 0 8147 6693 5
Show More
Show More
... It takes a special man to resist Hilda von Einem. A German spy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1916), she is a ‘known man-eater’, who tries to inspire a rising of ‘Muslim hordes’ against the British Empire. ‘With her bright hair and the long exquisite oval of her face she looked like some destroying fury of a Norse legend ...

Choke Point

Patrick Cockburn: In Dover, 7 November 2019

... out every day, along with the hordes of cars and caravans and passengers on foot transported on P&O ferries to and from Calais. The Port of Dover is the UK’s closest point of connection to the continent beyond, just 21 miles away: £122 billion in imports and exports pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or south, stand out ...

On Octavio Paz and Marie-José Tramini

Homero Aridjis, translated by Chloe Aridjis, 21 November 2019

... Surrounded by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo delle Carceri, home to Saint Francis’s stone ...

Algorithmic Fanboy

Colin Burrow: Thick Rules and Thin, 1 June 2023

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By 
by Lorraine Daston.
Princeton, 359 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 0 691 15698 9
Show More
Show More
... English use of the word ‘model’ occurred in a translation of Euclid by the mathematician John Dee in 1570, and through the 17th century the word could be used to mean, variously, a plan or design, an ‘ideal example’ and ‘a unit of scale’. So in this last sense an architectural feature which conformed to the golden ratio of 1.62:1 might be ...

Divinely Ordained

Jackson Lears: God loves America, 19 May 2011

A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided 
by Amanda Foreman.
Penguin, 988 pp., £12.99, June 2011, 978 0 14 104058 5
Show More
Show More
... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund ...

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