Search Results

Advanced Search

151 to 165 of 201 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

A Hit of Rus in Urbe

Iain Sinclair: In Lea Valley, 27 June 2002

... in March 1998, the application still awaited final approval from the Trade and Industry Secretary, Stephen Byers. (Poor man. It was going to get worse, much worse. Byers epitomised the New Labour attitude of glinting defiance; fiercely tonsured and spectacled, tight-lipped, scorched by flashbulbs in the passenger seat of a ministerial limo, assaulted by furry ...
... from the confusing tariff of one oligopolistic supplier to another doesn’t protect them from sharp, unpredictable swings in prices. In overseas chanceries the Thatcher doctrine came up against ambitious leaders who were no less patriotic, but not so arrogant and naive. Unlike Thatcher, they didn’t assume that if their country levelled its playing ...

All the girls said so

August Kleinzahler: John Berryman, 2 July 2015

The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 427 pp., £11.99, October 2014, 978 0 374 53455 4
Show More
77 Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 84 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53452 3
Show More
Berryman’s Sonnets 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 127 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53454 7
Show More
The Heart Is Strange 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 179 pp., £17.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 22108 9
Show More
Poets in their Youth 
by Eileen Simpson.
Farrar, Straus, 274 pp., £11.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 23559 8
Show More
Show More
... don’t think it is what I like, really – though I certainly admire Lowell’s.Bishop is pretty sharp so far as the influences go. I don’t see much of Stevens, though Berryman read and admired him a great deal (‘better than us; less wide’, he wrote in a eulogy for Stevens, ‘Dream Song 219’). Certainly Pound, whom Berryman not only admired but was ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
Show More
Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
Show More
Show More
... treason no one could forfeit this basic ‘human right’. This new regime of rights stood in sharp contrast to unenlightened polities where there was no civil contract and where to be sovereign meant precisely to exercise unlimited authority over the bodies of subjects. Torture and various acts of making such power felt in the flesh – drawings and ...

Signs of spring

Anthony Grafton, 10 June 1993

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent 
by Charles Dempsey.
Princeton, 173 pp., £35, December 1992, 0 691 03207 6
Show More
Show More
... when he argues for the historical greatness and uniqueness of Laurentian culture. But his sharp observations of detail, apposite quotations and fine analyses of Botticelli’s social and cultural world hold the attention. He displays leep knowledge of literary sources and traditions as well as images. Social historians will learn much from him about ...

Who is Stewart Home?

Iain Sinclair, 23 June 1994

... network of global collaborators, a conspiracy of the unheard, and with one man in particular, the sharp-witted London activist Stewart Home.Home, in stark contrast to the brothers on the Celtic fringe, was a dynamo of invention, recycling Dadaist provocation into fugues of inspired counter-terror, then moving on. A suspicion lingers in the scorch marks that ...

Touching the music

Paul Driver, 4 January 1996

Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 
by Robert Craft.
Vanderbilt, 588 pp., £35.95, October 1994, 0 8265 1258 5
Show More
Show More
... as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ideal for my real one’ – an admission of 1994 which ...

Theory of Texts

Jerome McGann, 18 February 1988

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: The Panizzi Lectures 1985 
by D.F. McKenzie.
British Library, 80 pp., £10, December 1986, 0 7123 0085 6
Show More
Show More
... version of a work – say, Hyder Rollins’s Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or Stephen Booth’s more recent critical edition. Each is a particular attempt to define a comprehensive socio-historical field for the sonnets. Their respective virtues are as much a function of their limits as of their particular strengths, both of which they ...

The Great Scots Education Hoax

Rosalind Mitchison, 18 October 1984

The Companion to Gaelic Scotland 
edited by Derick Thomson.
Blackwell, 363 pp., £25, December 1983, 0 631 12502 7
Show More
Experience and Enlightenment: Socialisation for Cultural Changes in 18th-Century Scotland 
by Charles Camic.
Edinburgh, 301 pp., £20, January 1984, 0 85224 483 5
Show More
Knee Deep in Claret: A Celebration of Wine and Scotland 
by Billy Kay and Cailean Maclean.
Mainstream, 232 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 45 8
Show More
Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities 
by R.D. Anderson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, July 1983, 0 19 822696 9
Show More
Scotland: The Real Divide 
edited by Gordon Brown and Robin Cook.
Mainstream, 251 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 18 0
Show More
Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff.
Cambridge, 371 pp., £35, November 1983, 0 521 23397 6
Show More
Show More
... to force some of their contributors to clean up their papers. The worst presented paper, that by Stephen Kendrick on ‘Social Change’, has a remarkable repertoire of literary bad manners: unlabelled columns in tables, tables labelled and promised but non-existent, unexplained initials. The most conspicuous weakness is the lack of a historical ...

Oh, My Aching Back

Roy Porter, 2 November 1995

The History of Pain 
by Roselyne Rey, translated by Elliott Wallace and J.A. Cadden , and S.W. Cadden.
Harvard, 394 pp., £25.50, October 1995, 0 674 39967 6
Show More
Show More
... of moral fibre). ‘That anybody should be in pain and not be immediately relieved – that sharp pain should ever be inflicted upon anyone,’ bemoaned the eminent Victorian jurist, James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘shocks and scandalises people in these days.’ Assessment, as Rey recognises, is tricky. Does the founding ...

Born to Lying

Theo Tait: Le Carré, 3 December 2015

John le Carré: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Bloomsbury, 652 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 4088 2792 5
Show More
Show More
... remained a threat. He bolted from Oxford – this time to marry his long-term girlfriend, Ann Sharp, the intelligent and artistic daughter of a raffish RAF war hero. The couple would have three boys. His father’s latest bankruptcy had left him penniless, so Cornwell taught for a while at Edgarley Hall, a prep school in Somerset, before going back to ...

Glimpsed in the Glare

Michael Neill: Shakespeare in 1606, 17 December 2015

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 423 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 571 23578 0
Show More
Show More
... let alone even the most influential works of criticism. As the founding father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of ...

Cynical Realism

Randall Kennedy: Supreme Court Biases, 21 January 2021

... Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latinx on the Court, in 2009 by Barack Obama, who also nominated Elena Kagan the following year. Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy ...

Outbreaks of Poets

Robert Crawford, 15 June 2023

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture 
by Clare Bucknell.
Head of Zeus, 344 pp., £27.99, February, 978 1 80024 144 2
Show More
Show More
... of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.But in England itself it was too often taken for ...

Eye to the Keyhole

Tom Crewe: Pratt and Smith, 25 April 2024

James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder 
by Chris Bryant.
Bloomsbury, 313 pp., £25, February, 978 1 5266 4497 8
Show More
Show More
... some simple questions and remanded them till Monday.What should already strike us here is the sharp descent to normality, to humdrum criminality and court procedure. Bryant seems almost wounded that the three men were ‘lumped in with a bunch of petty thieves’. It doesn’t quite fit the picture he has offered of a Britain defined by homophobia, what ...

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